Book Blitz: WEST BEGG by Mari.Reiza

~ Book Blitz ~

WEST BEGG by Mari.Reiza

Humour / Satire

About the Book:

A hilarious yet dark novel on how power, and the lack of it, shapes people. 

Luca’s job is being a punch bag, a tea towel, a toilet bowl, to the undeniable and unbreakable king of egg power proud of averaging two hundred flights a year to visit chicken markets around the world. 
Anna moved to Catania to work for caper queen Madame Sicily, fulfilling varied tasks from picking up Céline swimwear before it hits the runways to recovering badly parked Lamborghinis. 
La Revolução dreams through buildings but builds parking spaces, when she’s not helping launder money for her boss’s dad’s dodgy charities. 
And finally, Carolina is out to conspire with Paquita who met their boss the German in a red lit booth, to understand why the man has to drain the passion out of everything. Their fates will inevitably collide. The question is, will their bosses get what they deserve? 

Book Links:
Goodreads * Amazon


Quotes:
At the office, Macco One’s sickened secretary barely acknowledges me. She firmly maintains that it is sickening to work in our place, Macco One’s place, says that it is not about the chickens but the cocks, ‘Too many big cocks flying around.’ I have never known her on a high. I leave the box of Indian sweets I bought her by the pot plant on her desk and hope that they poison her, ending her ordeal. (Luca)

The thought of my boss’s iron calves ungoverned scares me. Is it panic or an absolute type of anger? Does he know what he is angry about?’ Ignorance about one’s anger can be harder to deal with than deliberate devil. Sometimes I have nightmares where he chops my arm with the drama of a man picking cherries. (Carolina)

I cannot leave the swimwear on the bike. It is a church, Saint Agatha. No one should steal it by the virgin’s gate. But even so. These people cannot help themselves. They all want to look good at Mondello this summer. (Anna)

Irajá, which means beehive, is stunning, very pale with dark hair, so pale you can see millions of small blue veins through the skin of her face and neck, giving her a magical tinge. This is not the kind of woman you can imagine doing ordinary things like shitting or clipping her toenails. (La Revolução)

I’m crying on Paquita’s shoulders yet again. Her jumper is cheap cashmere. She is small and delicate and perfectly proportionate like a kid’s mannequin. And I am totally aware that this is the strangest of arrangements. (Carolina)

She is not Fuksas. Even if Irajá is convinced that in her heart she is a great architect with a social vision. I guess it keeps her away from pretending to be something more dangerous. When she purses her lips, the natives show fright on their faces and for a moment I expect a long viper tongue to come out pushing against her lips. I think they do too… This pale bundle of nerves is so thin and young, must be less than fifty kilos, below twenty five years of age. Any of those native hands could easily crush her to the ground, but they are afraid. (La Revolução)

Read a Snippet:

Paquita is the only one who really knows him.
She knows even the small things about him, like why he spends his little free time watching documentaries about extreme conditions and casualties of war including gas chambers and prisoner camps. She says he lives constantly defeated like the lowest worm. A dressing gown-ed, porno-clicking, self-suffering cut-off, only soothed by the corrosive fizz of some yellow pills. At least he needs less porn now that he has her.
‘Everyone he loved has died on him,’ she insists, ‘he feels betrayed by mankind and can only take the most sanitized forms of human contact.’
I can agree. ‘He does not seem to love any of us in the office very much, Paquita. That’s for sure.’
She nods as if thankful for my understanding. Next she re-tells me the story of how they met in a red lit booth in Hamburg. He apparently spoke to her of his tears, pills and mucus down his throat being the shades, flavours and textures of his days.
‘I did not know he could be that poetic,’ I tell her.
‘It was a breach of etiquette,’ she confesses, ‘and I think that he had been made uncomfortable by the heat in the booth which had been turned up to accommodate ladies in their underwear.’ She means nude sex workers but makes it sound like delicate dolls.
Paquita tells me that he came back to her booth again and again after the first time, until he asked for her to work for him exclusively. And when he got the job in Brussels, he took her with him. Apparently, the arrangement is that in public she is his housekeeper, but of course she is so much more than that. They are a smiley duo, a team, Lemon and Lime.
Paquita doesn’t like when I call it compensated dating. She does not like to be called a fuck-buddy either.
I could use Paquita’s confessions to hurt him, to destroy his career. The most important man in the European rail business lives with an Ecuadorian whore. Paquita is well over the legal age but he could still get done for enslaving her? He has not offered her marriage. She does not even have residency papers. Does he keep her passport under lock and key? But of course, this would also destroy Paquita.
I cannot get myself to destroy her illusion that they exist as a blessed unit.
(Carolina)

About the Author:

Mari.Reiza was born in Madrid in 1973. She studied at Oxford University and worked as an investment research writer and management consultant for twenty years in London, before becoming an indie fiction writer. Also by her, Inconceivable Tales, Death in Pisa, Sour Pricks, A Pack of Wolves, STUP, Mum, Watch Me Have Fun!, Marmotte’s Journey, West bEgg, PHYSICAL, Room 11, Triple Bagger, Opera and the Retreat, all available on Amazon.



Author Links:
Twitter * Instagram