Category Archives: Travel Guides
Memoirs of a Geisha
This story is a rare and utterly engaging experience. It tells the extraordinary story of a geisha -summoning up a quarter century from 1929 to the post-war years of Japan`s dramatic history, and opening a window into a half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. A young peasant girl is sold as servant
Grace Notes
Returning to Belfast after a long absense, to attend her father`s funeral. Catherine McKenna – a young composer – remembers exactly why she left: the claustrophobic intimacies of the Catholic enclave, her fastidious, nagging mother, and the pervading tensions of a city at war with itself. She remembers a more innocent time, when the Loyalists
Black Athena : Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.
Classical civilisation, Martin Bernal argues, has deep roots in Afro-Asiatic cultures. But these Afro-Asiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied, or suppressed since the eighteenth century – chiefly for racist reasons. The popular view is that Greek civilisation was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers–or
Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
Paris in the twenties: Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Jake is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, but with an abandoned, sensuous nature that she cannot change. When the couple drifts to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the bullfight,
Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
Men and women of passion and action live, fight, love and die in scenes of dramatic intensity. From haunting tragedy on the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro to brutal sensationalism in the bullring; from rural America with its deceptive calm to the heart of war-ravaged Europe, each of the stories in this classic collection is a
Against the Wall
Simon Yates is the man who cut the rope in Joe Simpson`s award-winning account of their struggle for survival in “Touching the Void”. In this book, Yates recounts how he and three companions climbed the world`s largest vertical rock-face, in the Chilean Andes.
Cry, The Beloved Country – a Story of Comfort in Desolation
Alan paton’s ‘Cry, The Beloved Country” was first published in 1948, and today still stands as arguably the single most important novel in twentieth century South African literature.’Cry, the Beloved Country” is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the background of a land and a
Russka (Russia)
Russka is a vast tapestry of a novel in which serf and master, Cossack and Tsar, priest and Jew are brought together in a family saga which unrolls through centuries of history to reveal that most impenetrable and mysterious of lands…Russia. Through the life of a little town east of Moscow in the Russian heartland,
Viceroy of Ouidah
In 1812, Francisco Manoel da Silva, escaping a life of poverty in Brazil, sailed to the African kingdom of Dahomey, determined to make his fortune in the slave trade. Armed with nothing but an iron will, he became a man of substance in Ouidah and the founder of a remarkable dynasty. His one remaining ambition
Pennine Walkies
The original Boogie, reluctant hero of the South West Peninsular Path, was the Mongrel from hell. Mark Wallington`s New Boogie, like New Labour, appears a much trendier and more wholesome incarnation -until, that is, Mark gets him on the Pennine Way. This is the big one in every sense. Clearly Boogie will do fine -but
On the Black Hill
On the Black Hill is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the 20th century. In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis
Terra Incognita – Travels in Antarctica
`Terra Incognita` stems from when Sara Wheeler was invited by the American government to be the 1994 Writer in Residence at the US South Pole Station. She spent six weeks at the pole and on the edge of the infamous Ross Ice Shelf which finally defeated Fiennes and Stroud in their recent unsupported Antarctic crossing.
Citizen Lord
The sequel to “Aristocrats”, this tells the story of the headstrong and passionate 18th century Irish revolutionary, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Son of a duke, heir to estates and influence, Lord Edward died in a Dublin gaol, a rebel and a traitor. Born in 1763, he joined the British army as a teenager, fought in the
With Chatwin
Few writers have had as many distinct lives as Bruce Chatwin and few have been as compelling in person as in print. Chatwin was a traveller, an aesthete and an anthropologist. In his twenties he was a star at Sotheby`s; in his thirties he was a star at The Sunday Times. A solitary man and
A Room Of One`s Own And Three Guineas
This volume combines for the first time in paperback two books by Virginia Woolf which are among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century. Together they form a brilliant attack on Patriarchy and sexual inequality. A Room Of One`s Own, first published in 1929, is a witty, urbane and persuasive argument against the intellectual
Bury Me Standing
Gypsies have always intrigued and fascinated – partly because of their mysterious origins, and partly because of the romance of nomadism. But because they resist assimilation, having survived as a distinct people for over a thousand years, they have also been the victims of other people`s nationalism and xenophobia. In this fascinating and timely study,
Hidden Agendas
In this powerful book, journalist and film maker John Pilger strips away the layers of deception, dissembling language and omission that prevent us from understanding how the world really works. From the invisible corners of Tony Blair`s Britain to Burma, Vietnam, Australia, South Africa and the illusions of the `media age`, power, he argues, has
London Fields
There is a murderer, there is a murderee, and there is a foil. Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. And this is a love story. But the murderee – Nicola Six – is searching for something and someone else: her murderer. She knows the
Emperor`s Last Island: Journey to St Helena
The Emperor`s Last Stand is a book about St Helena, an island with a sad, strange history, and about the tangle of stories and myths, absurdities and simple facts that have accumulated around Napoleon and his sojourn here. It follows him through the eyes of those who lived with him, who guarded him, who managed
Dark Shadows Falling
In 1992 an Indian climber was left to die on Mount Everest, despite being just 30 metres or so from another climbing team`s camp. The controversy sparked by this event and by the increasing abuse of Mount Everest for financial gain appalls Joe Simpson and is the basis for this gripping polemic.”His concern is that
