Photo: David Stanton Rosemary J. Brown is a journalist based in London and author of Following Nellie Bly: Her Record-Breaking Race Around the World. Rosemary is an avid traveller and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, where she helped organize the first Heritage of Women in Exploration conference. Her articles have appeared in publications including …
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Translated from Uzbek and Russian by Shelley Fairweather-VegaPublished by Tilted Axis Press “Life in exile! May it be cursed. Once you have become a stranger, a stranger you shall remain; you may endeavour to make friends, but the task is a difficult one, full end to end with uncertainty.” One night, Uzbek writer Sheikov dreams …
Published by Soho Press, Inc. This is more than just a crime novel: by setting it in India in the early 1900s, Sujata Massey paints a vivid portrait of the country and especially of the lives of the women at the time. The book starts in Bombay in 1921. The British are still in India, …
Published by Penguin and Oxford University Press “I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own...”The Treasure of Abbot Thomas M.R. James is one of the best—if not the best—ghost story writer in the English language. Born in 1862, he went on to …
Published by Penguin This is a family memoir: by tracing the lives of her grandmother, mother and herself, Margaret Forster looks at how things have changed for working-class women in the UK. This book brings to light the hidden lives, lives often considered too unimportant to be documented. Forster’s grandmother, Margaret Ann, was born to …
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Published by Faber Books Domestic abuse, homophobia, family secrets...and love. Ingrid Persaud packs it all into this novel set in Trinidad. Betty was married to Sunil, an abusive man, who didn’t stop at hurting his wife but also hit his young son. “That man gave you love you could feel. He cuff you down? Honeymoon. …
Published by Faber and Faber This is Tom Stoppard’s play about Czechoslovakia, protest, love, and the power of rock and roll. It covers the years from 1968 to 1990, and the action moves between the house of Max—a staunch communist and a member of the British Communist Party—in Cambridge and the apartment of Jan, a …
Published by the University of Arizona Press From 1946 to 1958, the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons in what is now the Marshall Islands, an event which seems to have slipped into the mists of history. But it is still very real for the islanders, as Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, a Marshallese poet, points out. As …
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Published by Faber Books “‘The body is in the library,’ Colonel Osborne said. ‘Come this way.’” This book begins like a traditional English whodunit: with a body in the library in a country house. It’s a cliché—except that John Banville doesn’t do clichés. He uses a murder mystery to paint a portrait of Ireland in …
Published by Cannongate and Harper Peter Hessler is an American journalist who speaks fluent Chinese and was The New Yorker’s correspondent in China from 2000 to 2007. While he was there, he got himself a Chinese driving licence and travelled through the country. Hessler applied for a Chinese driving licence in 2001. Acquiring the licence …
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