Category Archives: Travel Guides
Bitter Leaf
Bitter Leaf is a richly textured and intricate novel set in Mannobe, a world that is African in nature but never geographically placed. At the heart of the novel is the village itself and its colourful cast of inhabitants: Babylon, a gifted musician who falls under the spell of the beautiful Jericho who has recently
The Red Book
`Destined to be a classic …a sharply funny, clear-eyed examination, in the vein of Mary McCarthy`s The Group, of the power and burden of privilege, the reality of being a modern woman and the lasting bonds of female friendship.` – Vanity Fair Can a weekend change your life? Clover, Addison, Mia and Jane were college
We Had it So Good
Born to hardworking immigrant parents in sunny suburban Los Angeles, Stephen Newman never imagined that he would spend his adult life under the grey skies of north London, would marry Andrea for convenience and stay married, and would watch his children grow into people he cannot fathom. Over forty years he and his friends have
Poor Cow
Joy – also called Blossom, Sunshine and Blondie by the men in her life – walks down Fulham Broadway carrying her week-old baby, Jonny. She is twenty-one, with bleached hair, high suede shoes, and a head full of dreams. Her husband Tom is a thief and on the proceeds of a job they move to
To Algeria With Love
Louise, an American innocent, takes up a scholarship in the south of France in winter 1961 and promptly falls for Wally, a gregarious Algerian worker in flight from brutal colonial war. He teaches her about life and love in a chilly furnished room, against a background of French pop music that makes it all seem
The Wedding Group
First published in 1968, this quietly ironic exploration of the ways in which the parental mould is not easily broken, is one of Elizabeth Taylor`s most ambitious novels.”`You know,` Midge began, and paused. She was rather taken aback, and could not at once think of anything to say. `Perhaps there`s nothing so dangerous as having
A Long Way from Paradise
Leah Chishugi grew up in eastern Congo but, aged seventeen, she moved to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, to work as a model. She married and had a son. Then in 1994 she was caught up in the horrific conflict, and escaped only after being left for dead under a pile of corpses. She fled with
Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse
Suraya Sadeed grew up in a peaceful Afghanistan. Following the Soviet invasion in 1979, she left America with her family, building a new life. But after a sudden tragedy, Suraya returned to Afghanistan for a visit that changed everything. Shocked by the suffering and destruction wreaked on her homeland, Suraya was determined to help. Smuggling
The Paris Wife
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness, until she meets Ernest Hemingway. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they soon fall in with a circle of lively and volatile expatriates, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and
The Daylight and the Dust: Selected Short Stories
I`m a short story addict, both reading and writing them, and I always keep hoping for the perfect story.` (Janet Frame to Tim Curnow, January 1984) THE DAYLIGHT AND THE DUST is the most comprehensive selection of Janet Frame`s stories ever published, taken from the four different collections released during her lifetime and featuring many
The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam
Nyree and Cia live on a remote farm in the east of what was Rhodesia in the late 1970s. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, theirs is a seductive childhood laced with African paganism, mangled Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Their world
All God`s Children Need Travelling Shoes
All God`s Children Need Travelling Shoes is the fifth volume of Maya Angelou`s autobiography.Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In the fifth volume, Maya Angelou emigrates to Ghana only to discover that `you can`t go
Towards Another Summer
A deeply rewarding and beautiful novel` Hilary Mantel, Guardian Life in England seems transitory for Grace Cleave as the pull of her native New Zealand grows stronger. She begins to feel increasingly like a migratory bird. Grace longs to find her own place in the world, if only she can decide where that is. But
Tehran, Lipstick and Loopholes
A wry and humorous account of Nahal Tajadod`s quest to get her Iranian passport renewed. She embarks on a bizarre and circuitous journey, meeting a colourful cast of characters along the way: two photographers who specialise in Islamic portraits, a forensic surgeon who trades in human organs and a grandmother who offers a live chicken
The Clothes on Their Backs
In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat
Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore
Justinian took a wife: and the manner she was born and bred, and wedded to this man, tore up the Roman Empire by the very roots` Procopius Charming, charismatic, heroic – Theodora of Constantinople rose from nothing to become the most powerful woman in the history of Byzantine Rome. In Stella Duffy`s breathtaking new novel,
What Language Do I Dream in?: My Family`s Secret History
Elena Lappin`s life could be described as `five languages in search of an author`. She now lives in London, but she was born in Russia and has lived in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Israel, Canada, and the United States. As a multiple emigre, her decision to write in English was the unexpected result of many wanderings, and
The Room of Lost Things
Under his railway arch in Loughborough Junction, South London, Robert Sutton is taking leave of a lifetime of hard work. His dry-cleaning shop lies at the heart of a lively community, a fixed point in a changing world. And, as he explains to his successor, young East Londoner Akeel, it is also the resting place
With Their Backs to the World – Portraits from Serbia
From the award-winning author of The Bookseller of Kabul comes a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary Serbs under Milosevic and the dramati c events leading up to his fall. Asne Seierstad`s first book, which some consider to be her best, follows fourteen Serbs whose lives were transformed over the course of sixteen months.
Married to a Bedouin
Married to a Bedouin” is Marguerite van Geldermalsen`s story of how a New Zealand- born nurse became the wife of Mohammad Abdallah Othman, a Bedouin souvenir-seller of the Manaja(h) tribe, and lived with him – and their children – and a community of about one hundred families – in the ancient caves of Petra in
