Category Archives: Travel Guides
India Rising
India is on the up. Historically derided as the lumbering elephant of Asia, this vast sub-continent has quickened its pace. The economy is booming. Tens of millions have been pulled out of poverty. Software and service companies abound. Millionaire entrepreneurs are springing up at every turn. Bollywood is going global and Indian expats are flooding
Difficult Daughters
Set around the time of Partition and written with absorbing intelligence and sympathy, Difficult Daughters is the story of a young woman torn between the desire for education and the lure of illicit love. Virmati, a young woman born into a high-minded household, falls in love with a neighbour, the Professor – a man who
A Married Woman
Astha has everything an educated, middle-class woman could ask for: comfortable surroundings, children and a dutiful loving husband. So why should she be consumed by a sense of unease and dissatisfaction? And when she begins a relationship with another woman, is she liberating herself from her marriage, past and culture – or foolishly jeopardising everything
Ship of Fools
For twenty years, Ireland`s economic miracle was supposed to be the envy of the world. Low taxes, light regulation and an `anything goes` attitude seemed to have created boundless prosperity. And then, as in Iceland, the glittering palaces vanished in the heat of the global financial meltdown. For years, those with economic power had been
Manhattan `45
Winner of the 2018 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award`s Outstanding Contribution to Travel WritingIn 1945, New York City stood at the pinnacle of its cultural and economic power. Never again would the city possess the unique mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality, generosity and confidence which characterized it in this moment of triumph.
Sydney
Winner of the 2018 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award`s Outstanding Contribution to Travel WritingRenowned and much-loved travel writer Jan Morris turns her eye to Sydney: `not the best of the cities the British Empire created… but the most hyperbolic, the youngest at heart, the shinest`.
Venetian Navigators: The Voyages of the Zen Borthers to the Far North
In the 1380s and 90s, Nicolo and Antonio Zen journeyed from Venice up the North Atlantic, encountering warrior princes, fighting savage natives and, just possibly, reaching the New World a full century before Columbus. This title tells the story of their adventure travelled throughout Europe, from the workshop of the great cartographer Mercator to the
The Immigrant
Nina is a thirty-year-old English lecturer in New Delhi, living with her widowed mother and struggling to make ends meet. Ananda has recently emigrated to Halifax, Canada; having spent his twenties painstakingly building his career, he searches for something to complete his new life. When Ananda`s sister proposes an arranged marriage between the two, Nina
The Black Monastery
When Nikos, a detective in the final years of his career, is persuaded back to his home town he is faced with the gory murder of a young boy near the old monastery. Echoing two murders committed 33 years previously in the exact same spot, and a mass cult suicide, it brings back a part
Nocturnes
Remains of the Day” author Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Nocturnes” is five stories ‘of Music and Nightfall’, capturing the passing of years in compassionate prose that looks closely at the human condition.In ‘Nocturnes” Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat
The Red Coffin
It is 1939. The world stands on the brink of Armageddon. In the Soviet Union, years of revolution, fear and persecution have left the country unprepared to face the onslaught of Nazi Germany. For the coming battles, Stalin has placed his hopes on a 30-ton steel monster, known to its inventors as the T-34 tank,
Eye of the Red Tsar
It is the time of the Great Terror. Inspector Pekkala – known as the Emerald Eye – was the most famous detective in all Russia. He was the favourite of the Tsar. Now he is the prisoner of the men he once hunted. Like millions of others, he has been sent to the gulags in
City of Fortune – How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire
A magisterial work of gripping history, “City of Fortune “tells the story of the Venetian ascent from lagoon dwellers to the greatest power in the Mediterranean – an epic five hundred year voyage that encompassed crusade and trade, plague, sea battles and colonial adventure. In Venice, the path to empire unfolded in a series of
Complete Stories
This is the complete collection of stories from one of the most original and powerful American writers of the twentieth-century. Including “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, this collection also contains several stories only available in this volume.
An Elegy For Easterly
A woman in a township in Zimbabwe is surrounded by throngs of dusty children but longs for a baby of her own; an old man finds that his job making coffins at No Matter Funeral Parlour brings unexpected riches; a politician`s widow quietly stands by at her husband`s funeral watching his colleagues bury an empty
A Sleepwalk on the Severn
“This is not a play. This is a poem in several registers, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead, all based on real people from the
A Gate At The Stairs
With America quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a `half-Jewish` farmer`s daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to university – escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who
Invisible
Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible opens in New York City in the spring of 1967 when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to
Zorba The Greek
Set before the start of the First World War, this moving fable sees a young English writer set out to Crete to claim a small inheritance. But when he arrives, he meets Alexis Zorba, a middle-aged Greek man with a zest for life. Zorba has had a family and many lovers, has fought in the
The Somme Stations
On the first day of the Somme enlisted railwayman Jim Stringer lies trapped in a shell hole, smoking cigarette after cigarette under the bullets and the blazing sun. He calculates his chances of survival – even before they departed for France, a member of Jim`s unit had been found dead. During the stand-off that follows,
