thanhtoong0

thanhtoong0

iPhone 17 Tipped to Receive a Price Hike in India Amid Stock Shortage and High Demand

The iPhone 17 was launched in India in September, bringing about meaningful upgrades over its predecessor. Among those was a bump in the base storage to 256GB, which came at a price increase of about Rs. 3,000 over the iPhone 16. A tipster claims that Apple could hike the price of all SKUs of the iPhone 17 in India. This is attributed to the high demand for the handse...

The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly review – horror, humanity and Dr Asperger

The reader grapples with fascism and complicity through the eyes of a mute autistic girl being treated during the second world war

As I started reading Alice Jolly’s new novel, whose narrator is a mute autistic girl in wartime Vienna, I realised that I was resisting its very premise. I am generally sceptical about books that use child narrators to add poignancy to dark plots, or novels that use nazism as a means of introducing moral jeopardy to their characters’ journeys. And yet by the end Jolly had won me over. This is a book that walks a tightrope between sentimentality and honesty, between realism and imagination, and creates something spirited and memorable as it does so.

We meet our fierce narrator, Adelheid Brunner, when she is brought into a children’s hospital by her grandmother, who cannot cope with the little girl’s fixations. Adelheid is obsessed with the matchboxes of the title, which she is constantly studying, ordering and occasionally discarding. In the hospital, she finds that she and her fellow child inmates are the object of obsessive study in turn by their doctors – sometimes understood, sometimes valued, and then, tragically, sometimes discarded.

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