There is something quite addictive about Thomas Schlesser's Mona's Eyes ( Les yeux de Mona in French). Once you start reading it, you cannot stop, even though nothing much happens over the course of its 300 pages, and the 52 chapters all follow the same pattern. Written in the vein of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World (1991), a fictional survey of Western philosophy as seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl, Schlesser's novel, a bestseller in Europe, offers a similarly compact, often exhilarating cruise through the last few centuries of Western art.
To my horror, I couldn't make out a single word on the display. The customer, a woman with her young daughter, stood impatiently as I froze. I didn't know what to say. After a few awkward minutes, the hiring manager dismissed me and I received a rejection email the next morning. My dreams of attending Wireless and Reading festivals with my friends disintegrated and I had another, more important, revelation: for the first time in my life, I realised that I was disabled.
