Category Archives: Travel Guides
The File on H
Two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to Albania in the 1930s with a tape recorder (a `new fangled` invention) in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers. Their purpose, they say, is to show how Homer`s epics might have been culled from a verbal tradition. But the local Governor believes its an elaborate
Geldof in Africa
Bob Geldof first visited Africa in 1984. The following year, Live Aid inspired a generation to raise millions for the starving in Africa. Over twenty years on, passion undiminished, Geldof returns to what he calls the Luminous Continent. This is his personal diary. Unflinchingly honest, and stunningly illustrated with his own photographs, “Geldof in Africa”
Bad Faith: A History of Family and Fatherland
Bad Faith tells the story of one of history`s most despicable villains and conmen – Louis Darquier, Nazi collaborator and `Commissioner for Jewish Affairs`, who dissembled his way to power in the Vichy government and was responsible for sending thousands of children to the gas chambers. After the war he left France, never to be
Nada
Eighteen-year old Andrea moves to Barcelona to stay with relatives she has not seen in years while she pursues her dreams of studying at university. Arriving in the dead of night she discovers not the independence she craves, but a crumbling apartment and an eccentric collection of misfits whose psychological ruin and violent behaviour echoes
Blood, Bones and Butter: The inadvertent education of a reluctant chef
Blood, Bones and Butter follows the chef Gabrielle Hamilton`s extraordinary journey through the places she has inhabited over the years. The rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with wooden spoon in hand. The French, Greek and Turkish kitchens, where she was often fed by complete strangers and learned
Circle of Friends
Big, generous-hearted Benny and the elfin Eve Malone have been best friends growing up in sleepy Knockglen. Their one thought is to get to Dublin, to university and to freedom…On their first day at University College, Dublin, the inseparable pair are thrown together with fellow students Nan Mahon, beautiful but selfish, and handsome Jack Foley.
The Second Sex
`One is not born, but rather becomes, woman`. First published in Paris in 1949, “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beavoir was a groundbreaking, risque book that became a runaway success. Selling 20,000 copies in its first week, the book earned its author both notoriety and admiration. Since then, “The Second Sex” has been translated
Digging to America
Friday August 15th, 1997. Two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families who have no more in common than this. Every year, on the anniversary of `Arrival Day` their two extended families celebrate together, with more and more elaborately competitive parties, as little Susan and Jin-ho take roots and become American. Full
My Name Was Judas
We all know the story of Jesus told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but what about the version according to Judas? In this witty, original and teasingly controversial account, some forty years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally tells the story as he remembers it. Looking back on his childhood and youth from
China Witness
Please note this title is printed on demand only. Delivery can take 2-4 weeks.China Witness is the personal testimony of a generation whose stories have not yet been told. Here the grandparents and great-grandparents of today sum up in their own words – for the first and perhaps the last time – the vast changes
What the Chinese Don`t Eat
Since June 2003 Xinran has been writing about China in her weekly column in the Guardian. She has covered a vast range of topics from food to sex education, and from the experiences of British mothers who have adopted Chinese daughters, to whether Chinese people do Christmas shopping or have swimming pools. Each of her
Constitutional
Charting tantrums, funerals, pregnancy, war and love affairs, these stories unroll with piercing wit and sympathy. One woman finds grief for her lost lover is assuaged by involvement in some carpentry repair work. Another grows increasingly angry as the grim reaper scythes through her circle, with farcical and tragic results. Elsewhere, a foreign correspondent receives
Miss Chopsticks
Sisters Three, Five and Six don`t have much education, but they know two things for certain: their mother is a failure because she hasn`t produced a son, and they only merit a number as a name. Women, their father tells them, are like chopsticks: utilitarian and easily broken. But when they leave their home in
The Amnesia Clinic
The Amnesia Clinic by James Scudamore sees the unlikely friendship pairing of Anti, a quiet ex-pat English boy, and Fabian, his flamboyant classmate, travelling across Ecuador in search of an ‘Amnesia Clinic’, in a tale of confused emotions and ever slipping sense of reality. Fabian lives with his Uncle Suarez, whose tales infect both boys
The Gathering
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn`t the drink that killed him – although that certainly helped – it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother`s house, in the winter of 1968. “The Gathering” is a novel
Doing Without Delia
Michael Booth has had his fill of celebrity chefs and their `on the table in five minutes` recipes. He wants to learn how to cook properly, so he burns his cookery books and, together with his young family, heads for a new life in Paris – reasoning that, if anyone can be trusted to make
The Brother Gardeners
“The Brother Gardeners” begins one January morning in 1734, when cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London`s Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds. Over the next forty years, Bartram
The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic
From the charismatic, eccentric Kinky Friedman comes ‘The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic”, a celebration of the sights, sounds & spirit of Austin, Texas. The original, inimitable Jewish cowboy and aspirant Governor of Texas – who hopes to reduce speeding limits to $54.95 – takes us on a near-spiritual walk through the town, covering everything from
John Aubrey: My Own Life
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD. This is the autobiography that John Aubrey never wrote. You may not know his name. Aubrey was a modest man, a gentleman-scholar who cared far more for the preservation of history than for his own legacy. But he was a passionate collector, an early archaeologist and the inventor
Perfect Hostage:Aung San Suu Kyi,Burma & the Generals
Like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi is an iconic figure, and the best-known prisoner of conscience alive today. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, at great personal cost she has steadfastly opposed Burma`s brutal military regime since 1988, when she emerged as the leader of the Burmese
