Category Archives: Travel Guides
Waiting For the Wild Beasts to Vote
Ahmadou Kourouma`s remarkable novel is narrated by Bingo, a West African sora – storyteller and king`s fool. Over the course of five nights he tells the life story of Koyaga, President and Dictator of the Gulf Coast. Orphaned at the age of seven, Koyaga grows up to be a terrible hunter; he fights mythical beasts,
Jaguar Smile: Nicaraguan Journey
In this brilliantly focused and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986. What he discovered was overwhelming: a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions,
Flame of Adventure
Simon Yates, author of Against the Wall, takes us back to his early years as a climber – the escapades and excitement of a young life lived on the edge and for the moment, when experience was all-important and dramatic achievements and failures came as naturally as the hair-raising risks themselves. A mountaineering travelogue of
Cider With Rosie
Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee, is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real
No Great Mischief
In 1779, driven out of his home, Calum McDonald set sail from the Scottish highlands with his extensive family. After a long, terrible journey, Calum settles his family in “the land of the trees” until they become a separate Nova Scotian clan, with its own identity and history.
Monsignor Quixote
With Sancho Panza, a deposed Communist mayor, his faithful Rocinate, an antiquated motorcar, Monsignor Quixote roams through modern-day Spain in a brilliant picaresque fable. Like Cervantes` classic, Monsignor Quixote offers enduring insights into our life and times.
Martha Gellhorn – A Life
This is a magnificent biography of Martha Gellhorn, whose fearless reporting from the front made her a legend, and whose private life was often messy and volcanic. Ernest Hemingway sent her a telegram: `Are you a war correspondent or my wife in bed?` She shook herself free of him, and chose to go adventuring. Martha
The Sea, The Sea
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN BURNSIDEWhen Charles Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous love affairs but unexpectedly bumps into his childhood sweetheart and sets his heart on destroying her marriage. His equilibrium is
The Basque History of the World
The author considers the possibility that the Basques may be one of the oldest people in Europe. Whether or not this is so there is no doubt that the region has always been strongly independent. In this book Mark Kurlansky uses and interesting mixture of reportage, photographs, anecdote and recipes to examines the history of
The Tenth Man
In a prison in Occupied France one in every ten men is to be shot. The prisoners draw lots among themselves – and for rich lawyer Louis Chavel it seems that his whole life has been leading up to an agonising and crucial failure of nerve. Hysterical with panic, fear, and a sense of injustice,
The Decay Of The Angel
The dramatic climax of “The Sea of Fertility” tetraology takes place in the late 1960s. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a sixteen-year-old orphan, Toru, as his heir, identifying him with the tragic protagonists of the three previous novels, each of whom died at the age of twenty. Honda raises and
The Hotel
These were the balmy days of the 1920s. The English, liberated from one long war and not yet faced with the next had – at least when well-off- a confident kind of vitality. `The Hotel` was a comfortable hotel on the Italian Riviera, run for prosperous English visitors. It was a closed world of wealth
Spring Snow
Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders – rich provincial familes, a new and powerful political and social elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family – members of the waning aristocracy – but he is not one of them. Coming of
The Innocent
The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present; comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life
Ali & Nino
Ali Khan and Nino Kipiani live in the cosmopolitan, oil-rich capital of Azerbaijan which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a melting-pot of different cultures. Ali is a Muslim, with his ancestors` passion for the desert, and Nino is a Christian Georgian girl with sophisticated European ways. Despite their differences, the two have
A Slender Thread
Stephen Venables was in illustrious mountaineering company, high on the unclimbed and sacred mountain Panch Chuli with a circle of British climbers, including Chris Bonington, when, at 1am on a dark Himalayan night, his abseil failed and he fell disastrously, somersaulting from rock to rock and landing, seriously wounded, at the end of a rope
Red Dust – A Path Through China
Red Dust tells the fascinating account of Ma Jian`s three-year journey around China. Following his 30th birthday he becomes desperate to escape the confines of his life in Beijing. Facing surveillance from his work unit and the police as a result of Deng Xiaoping`s clamping down on `Spiritual Pollution` he chooses to uproot himself from
Dublin
Edward Rutherfurd`s great Irish epic reveals the story of the people of Ireland through the focal point of the island`s capital city. The epic begins in pre-Christian Ireland during the reign of the fierce and powerful High Kings at Tara, with the tale of two lovers, the princely Conall and the ravishing Deirdre, whose travails
Some Prefer Nettles
The marriage of Kaname and Misako is disintegrating: whilst seeking passion and fulfilment in the arms of others, they contemplate the humiliation of divorce. Misako`s father believes their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, and so attempts to heal the breach by educating his son-in-law in the time-honoured
Salt – A World History
Homer called it a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlansky so brilliantly relates here, salt has shaped civilisation from the beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind. Wars have been fought over salt and, while salt taxes secured empires
