Category Archives: Travel Guides
In Youth is Pleasure
Against the backdrop of an English country hotel in a languid pre-war summer, Denton Welch`s alter ego, Orvil Pym, examines his early life and formative experiences with a Proustian intensity. An adolescent voyeur, Orvil takes pleasure in the microscopic observation of his relatives and fellow guests, charting their eccentricities and love affairs as faithfully as
Sacred Architecture of London
London has a unique series of churches built after the Great Fire of 1666, when most of the City of London was destroyed. Among these iconic churches are St Paul`s, St Mary-le-Bow, St Bride`s, St Clement Danes, St Martin-in-the-Fields, St Mary-le-Strand, St George Bloomsbury and Christ Church Spitalfields. They remain today as outstanding landmarks that
Havana Black
A brutally mutilated body is discovered washed up in the bay of Havana. The body of Miguel Forcade Mier, head smashed in by a baseball bat, genitals cut off by a dull knife. Forcade, once an official in the Cuban government responsible for the confiscation of the belongings of the bourgeoisie fleeing the revolution, was
The Lie
Nadia and Susanne have just met. They look uncannily alike, practically doppelgangers, but one is filthy rich, with a husband and a lover, and the other dirt poor and single. When Nadia eventually asks Susanne to spend the weekend with her husband how can she refuse the outrageous fee on offer? Nadia wants to spend
Havana Blue
Lieutenant Mario Conde is suffering from a terrible New Year`s Eve hangover. Though it`s the middle of a weekend, he is asked to urgently investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rafael Morin, a high-level business manager in the Cuban nomenklatura. Conde remembered Morin from their student days: good-looking, brilliant, a “reliable comrade` who always got what
Havana Gold
Twenty-four year old Lissette Delgado was beaten, raped, and then strangled with a towel. Marijuana is found in her apartment and her wardrobe is suspiciously beyond the means of a high school teacher. Lieutenant Conde is pressured by “the highest authority” to conclude this investigation quickly when chance leads him into the arms of a
Havana Red
WINNER OF THE HAMMETT PRIZEHavana Red is the first of Leonardo Padura’s awesome Havana quartet featuring Inspector Mario Conde; making Padura a Caribbean Ellroy if you will. And like the best of Ellroy’s work, Padura manages to expose the gritty, dirtier underbelly of Havana through the journey Conde takes to unravel the murder before him.On
A Not So Perfect Crime
Another day in Barcelona, another slimy politician`s wife is suspected of infidelity. Lluis Font discovers a portrait of his wife in an exhibition that leads him to conclude he is being cuckolded by the artist. Concerned only about the potential political fallout, he hires twins Eduard and Pep, private detectives with a supposed knack for
Night Bus
Leila is young, beautiful and a hustler. She makes her living drugging and robbing her clients – before or after bed, whichever is easier. Things get complicated when she ends up with a document at the centre of a plot of political blackmail. In an atmosphere of intense paranoia two secret service operatives, a goon
Havana Fever
Havana, 2003, fourteen years since Mario Conde retired from the police force and much has changed in Cuba. He now makes a living trading in antique books bought from families selling off their libraries in order to survive. In the house of Alcides de Montes de Oca, a rich Cuban who fled after the fall
The Public Prosecutor
Albert Savelkoul, the Public Prosecutor of Antwerp, has everything: power, money, magnificent horses, a family and a high-maintenance mistress. Despite problems with the mistress and his prostate he`s convinced that he is invincible, his power untouchable. And so it goes until everyone seems to turn on him. Albert`s wife, a member of the Belgian nobility,
David`s Revenge
A visitor from Georgia, a country torn apart by civil war, ends the peaceful existence of a school teacher`s family in Germany. Christian Kestner has all but forgotten his stay in Tbilisi seven years before. He begins to worry when he receives a letter from David Ninochvili announcing his visit to Germany. Why is David
The Thursday Night Widows
Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires. It`s Thursday night at the magnificent Scaglia house. Behind the locked gates, shielded from the crime, poverty and filth of the people on the streets, the Scaglias and their friends hide lives of infidelity, alcoholism, and abusive
Badfellas
Under cover of darkness, an American family moves into a villa in Cholong-sur-Avre in Normandy. Fred Blake, the father, tells everyone he is there to write a history of the Allied landings. His wife Maggie gets involved in a local charity; their teenage children enrol in the lycee. At first glance a family like any
Entanglement
The morning after a gruelling psychotherapy session in a Warsaw monastery, Henryk Telak is found dead, a roasting spit stuck in one eye. The case lands on the desk of State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki. World-weary, suffering from bureaucratic exhaustion and marital ennui, Szacki feels that life has passed him by, but this case changes everything.
Rare, Wild and Free
“Rare, Wild and Free” is a testament to the work of one of the finest nature writers Britain has ever produced – Mike Tomkies, who spent 35 years in the wildest and most remote places in Scotland, Canada and Spain to study and photograph the rarest and most dramatic wild creatures. The eminent critic J
Fast Talking PI
Fast Talking PI reflects the poet`s focus on issues affecting Pacific communities in New Zealand, and indigenous peoples around the world including the challenges and triumphs of being afakasi [mixed race]. The book is structured in three sections, Tusitala (personal), Talkback (political and historical) and Fast Talking PIs (dialogue). She writes as a calabash breaker,
The Ultimate Shipwreck Guide
The author has acquired a vast wealth of knowledge, data and experience in boat angling, sport and wreck diving over a period of almost 50 years and has written various wreck books, including two volumes about shipwrecks off the north-east coast of England. However, this book is far superior. No other single publication has so
Small World
“Small World” is a biting, very funny satire in which Parr looks at tourism worldwide, exposing the increasingly homogenous `global culture` where in the search for different cultures those same cultures are destroyed. Parr`s larger-than-life troupe of tourists are ultimately bemused victims of consumerism, locked into our insatiable craving for `the new`.
World of Street Food
This is the book to take the tastebuds travelling. Arepas from Venezuela, tom yam soup from Thailand, delicious mezze from the Middle East – “The World of Street Food” offers the best in fast food from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. Over a hundred recipes have been chosen for their popularity at
