How does an Italian become Italian? Or an Englishman English, for that matter? Are foreigners born, or made? In ” Italian Education, the sequel to his bestselling ” Italian Neighbours”, Tim Parks focuses on his own young children in the small village near Verona where he lives, building a fascinating picture of the contemporary Italian family at school, at home, at work & at play. The result is a delight: at once a family book & a travel book, not quite enamoured with either children or Italy, but always affectionate, always amused & always amusing.” Tim Parks is Italian enough to understand the country, foreign enough to see its peculiarities & talented enough to make them funny without resorting to cliché”
- * Daily Express*
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Sunshine, warmth, lemon blossom... Springtime in glorious Southern Italy can go to your head. Especially if you are escaping an overbearing husb&, the embarrassingly public loss of your company, an interfering mother who still tries to run your life or the pain of a husband`s affair with a girl young enough to be his daughter. As the Italian sun ripens the lemons in the groves that tumble down the hillsides & the Mediterranean dazzles beneath them, assertive Angela, extrovert Sylvie, unconfident Claire & mousy Monica find burgeoning friendship & begin to blossom in quite unexpected ways. Packed with memorable characters
- from the acid-tongued Grand Old Man of Modern Art who lives next door
- to the aspiring gigolo who thinks nothing of a forty year age gap, Maeve Haran`s new novel is a witty & entertaining reminder of why going a little mad in the sun can sometimes be exactly what you need.

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Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the Delhi school system, lives in one of the city`s slums with his widowed daughter & his eight-year-old granddaughter. Bumbling, ironical, sad, Ram is also a man tortured by a terrible guilty secret. When Rajiv Gandhi, the soon-to-be Prime Minister, is murdered, the country is plunged into confusion & Ram, as his department`s resident bribe-collector, is trapped in a series of escalating, potentially deadly political betrayals. While he tries to protect himself & his family, his daughter reveals a crime that he had hoped would be buried forever. An Obedient Father takes the reader to an India that is both far away & real
- into the mind of a character as tormented, funny, & morally ambiguous as one of Dostoevsky`s anti-heroes. This is a subtly rendered tragicomedy of contemporary India by an enormously gifted young writer.
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We not only live in the air, we live because of it. At ground level air transforms miraculously; it wraps our planet in a blanket of warmth, while the outer layer of our atmosphere soaks up violent flares from the sun. In this fascinating celebration of the Earth`s fragile atmosphere, Gabrielle Walker traces a journey of groundbreaking scientific discovery from the first experiments in the Renaissance to recent findings in space. ...

Permanently crippled in a fall from a horse, Liz Fordred refused to accept the limitations assumed for her in the Rhodesia of the late 1970's. She met & eventually married an equally (if more quietly) determined accident survivor named Pete Fordred, & together they hatched an audacious plan: to build a boat & sail around the world. That they lived more than 1, 000 miles from the ocean & had never sailed before would not stop them. Neither would their lack of money or the fact that basic boat gear was impossible to obtain in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Fabricating metal parts, learning carpentry, & resolutely tackling one seemingly insoluble problem after another, they built their boat in three years, trucked it to the South African coast, rigged it, learned to sail, & ultimately sailed the boat to America. In building the boat, Liz & Pete built their marriage & rebuilt their lives. Fordred's tone is forthright, good-humored, warm, & engaging. The reader can't help but like her. She would be a delightful shipmate. Her matter-of-fact descriptions of their challenges on shore & at sea reveal seemingly inexhaustible reservoirs of fortitude & optimism. All sailors dread those trips to the foredeck to change headsails in a storm, but they'll gain a new perspective on it through the eyes of a paraplegic. Thirty-six hours on deck battling high wind & seas is a hardship under any circumstances, but how much more so unable to st&, with nonfunctional stomach & back muscles, with your legs in spasm, with no way to get down to the cabin to cook or go to the bathroom? With no electronic navigation equipment aboard, they depended on Liz's celestial navigation. Imagine taking a sun sight with a sextant & no leg support on a rolling deck. This inspiring tale of triumph against long odds, now available for the first time in paperback, features a new endorsement from Christopher Reeve. ...

January 1895. On a freezing morning in the heart of Paris, an army officer, Georges Picquart, witnesses a convicted spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of twenty thousand spectators baying ` Death to the Jew!` The officer is rewarded with promotion: Picquart is made the French army`s youngest colonel & put in command of `the Statistical Section`
- the shadowy intelligence unit that tracked down Dreyfus. The spy, meanwhile, is given a punishment of medieval cruelty: Dreyfus is shipped off to a lifetime of solitary confinement on Devil`s Island
- unable to speak to anyone, not even his guards, his case seems closed forever. But gradually Picquart comes to believe there is something rotten at the heart of the Statistical Section. When he discovers another German spy operating on French soil, his superiors are oddly reluctant to pursue it. Despite official warnings, Picquart persists, & soon the officer & the spy are in the same predicament. Narrated by Picquart, An Officer & a Spy is a compelling recreation of a scandal that became the most famous miscarriage of justice in history. Compelling, too, are the echoes for our modern world: an intelligence agency gone rogue, justice corrupted in the name of national security, a newspaper witch-hunt of a persecuted minority, & the age-old instinct of those in power to cover-up their crimes.

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Storytelling kept alive the myths, legends & history of the Blasket Islands. In her old age, Peig Sayers, recounted her life to her son who recorded the tale in this book. She recalls the events of her life & her simple philosophy in a moving poetic style. Such everyday tasks as collecting turf for roots, catching & eating seals, & preparing for a wake are depicted alongside such momentous events as drownings at sea, pilgrimages, & the spread of the news of the Easter uprising in 1916. There were `clouds of sorrow`, but helping to lift them was the friendship she found in the community, which `was like a little rose in the wilderness`. The Blasket Islands are three miles off Irelands Dingle Peninsula. Until their evacuation just after the Second World War, the lives of the 150 or so Blasket Islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. A rich oral tradition of story-telling, poetry, & folktales kept alive the legends & history of the islands, & has made their literature famous throughout the world. The ”7 Blasket Island” books published by OUP contain memoirs & reminiscences from within this literary tradition, evoking a way of life which has now vanished. ...

Drawing on the legacy of Argentina`s Dirty War, Carlos Gamerro`s An Open Secret is a compelling postmodern thriller confronting guilt, complicity & the treachery of language itself. Dario Ezcurra is one of the thousands of Argentinians unlucky enough to be `disappeared` by the military government-murdered by the local chief of police with the complicity of his friends & neighbours. Twenty years later, Fefe, a child at the time of the murder, returns to the town where Dario met his fate & attempts to discover how the community let such a crime happen. Lies, excuses & evasion ensue
- desperate attempts to deny the guilty secret of which the whole community, even Fefe himself, is afraid. Translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett, Carlos Gamerro`s An Open Secret is published by Pushkin Press. ` Carlos Gamerro`s An Open Secret.. .has the makings of a classic`
- The Economist ` An Open Secret is paced like a taut thriller that.. .ultimately, rewards the reader.. . Gamerro creates a vivid sense of how gossip can poison a small town`
- The Independent ` An Open Secret digs away at the shallow graves of recent decades to find the pettiness, narrow-minds, & rivalries that motivated it`
- Ben Bollig, The Guardian Carlos Gamerro (b.1962) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has published the novels Las Islas, El sueno del senor juez, El secreto y las voces, La aventura de los bustos de Eva & the book of short stories El libro de los afectos raros as well as numerous works of literary criticism. He also wrote the film script for the movie Tres de corazones (2007).



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Evliya Celebi was the Orhan Pamuk of the 17th century, the Pepys of the Ottoman world
- a diligent, adventurous & honest recorder
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` The colonel talked to me about the women coming back to look for their husbands. What if a woman came back with a child fathered by someone from the other side, would they welcome her, ` I asked. He gave me that non-smile. ` To accept a woman who is carrying another man`s child
- that`s all part of national reconciliation.` (Chapter 12, ” War & Peace in Angola”, February 2003) The Angolan story is only another in the fantastic web of indulgence, misery, absurdity & suffering beyond expression that is bred in peace no less than war in `situations` the world over. The story told in this book involves an understanding of what is particular to Angola, but it goes far beyond that. It is a story of the extremes of the human condition &, as such, its relevance is timeless. Combining reportage & analysis, Justin Pearce shows the human face of Angola at a critical juncture in its history. Jonas Savimbi, leader of the rebel movement UNITA, was killed in February 2002. Crippled by the large imbalance between its resources & those of the MPLA government & the death of its messianic leader, UNITA collapsed, giving Angola its first extended period of peace since the nationalist uprising against Portuguese rule in the 1960s. Working as the BBC correspondent based in Luanda, Justin Pearce was the only English-speaking journalist based in Angola in 2001 & 2002. He travelled extensively in Angola, hearing the testimonies of those whose lives were shaped by political divisions & war. He was also able to observe how Angola was governed in a manner which had little in common with the ideals professed by the government since independence. This is an important book. It speaks to the non-specialist reader with an interest in African affairs; or people who have a particular interest in Angola, be it through business, humanitarian or policy development work, & who are looking for a perspective on the country`s recent social history.
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