Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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Yashar Kemal

Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brought to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. 
 
It was during the anarchic days when Russian invaders had put the Turkish army to flight and filled the roads of eastern Turkey with a horde of desperate refugees that the Kurdish Ismail Agha, fleeing with his family from his village on the shores of Lake Van, picked up a child left to die by the roadside with maggot-infested wounds. 
 
Thus did Salman become the adopted son of Ismail Agha who, after many reversals of fortune, achieved wealth in his new home. Salman grew up to worship the very ground on which his "father" trod, and to stand armed guard at his gate in all weathers. Change came with the eventual birth of a son, Mustafa, to Ismail Agha, who had come to despair of ever having an heir of his own flesh from his yet too young wife. 
 
Now the green-eyed serpent, Jealousy, entered the household: Mustafa grew up to be terrified of his adoptive brother, a man of unpredictable mood-swings - and impeccable marksmanship. But Jealousy chose a different and quite unexpected target when finally the knives came into play.

Salman The Solitary

Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Politkovskaya turns her steely gaze on President Putin and his early regime in this explosive book. 
 
From Putin's tyrannical grip on ordinary citizens to rampant corruption in highest ranks of the government, as well as Mafia dealings, scandals in the provinces and the decline of the intelligentsia, Politkovskaya offers a scathing condemnation of the President and his rule, revealing a shocking state of affairs: soldiers dying from malnutrition, parents requiring to bribes to recover their dead sons' bodies and conscripts are being hired out as slaves. 
 
Politkovskaya was an internationally admired, fearless and award-winning journalist who was assassinated in 2006. More relevant and important than ever in today's political landscape, Putin's Russia is both a gripping portrayal of a country in crisis and the testament of an extraordinary reporter. 
 
'A searing portrait of a country in disarray and of the man at its helm, from the bravest of journalists' New York Times 
 
'Anna Politkovskaya is a heroic journalist' Guardian 
 
'We will continue to learn from her for years' Salman Rushdie

Putin's Russia

The definitive account of Putin’s rise to power

Octavio Paz

In 1951 Octavio Paz travelled to India to serve as an attaché in the Mexican Embassy. Eleven years later he returned as Mexico's ambassador. In Light of India is Paz's celebration of that country and his most personal work of prose to date. As in all of his essays, he brings poetic insight and voluminous knowledge to bear on the subject, and the result is a series of fascinating discourses on India's landscape, culture and history. 
 
'The Antipodes of Coming and Going' is a lyrical remembrance of Paz's days in India, evoking with astonishing clarity the sights, sounds, smells and denizens of the subcontinent. 'Religions, Castes, Languages' gives a survey of Indian history and its astonishing polyglot society. 'A Project of Nationhood' is an examinatino of modern Indian politics, comparing the respective Islamic, Hindu and Western civilizations through the course of history. 'The Full and the Empty' is an exploration of what Paz calls the soul of India, its art, literature, music and philosophy. It is also an uncompromising indictment of the self-centred materialism of Western society.

In Light of India

David Bellos

"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times 
 
Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994 
 
George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation. 
 
David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel A Void (1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "père", "mere", and even "George Perec". 
 
His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.He belonged to the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. He died in his mid-forties after a short illness, leaving a truly puzzling detective novel, 53 Days, incomplete. 
 
"Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's oeuvre and to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - Jonathan Romney, Literary Review

Georges Perec: A Life in Words

Vincent Cronin

Catherine II, Empress of all the Russias, was the archetypal Enlightenment monarch. She reigned for more than 30 years, and during that time, as politician, diplomat, commander-in-chief, educator, builder, picture-collector, lover, mother, playwright, writer of fairy stories, autobiographer and indefatigable correspondent, she reformed and developed her largely unenlightened and backward country. Yet this woman, who at the age of 33, after 17 years of unhappy marriage, placed her deposed and murdered husband's crown on her own head, had begun life as an insignificant German princess. Catherine is interesting today not only as one of the most effective sovereigns of the late eighteenth century, but also as a determined career woman and head of government who dominated a vast empire as easily as she did her lovers and her court.

Catherine, Empress of All The Russias

Peter Matthiessen

In 1969 Peter Matthiessen set out with the expedition led by Peter Gimbel, whose aim was to find and film underwater for the first time the most dangerous of all sea creatures - the great white shark. Acting as the expedition's chronicler and spare hand (both on the surface and below), Matthiessen accompanied the crew from the Carribean to the whaling grounds off the Durban coast, to various islands in the Indian Ocean, to Ceylon, and finally to success off the bleak south coast of Australia. 
 
Blue Meridian records the awesome experience of swimming in open water among hundreds of sharks, the beauties of strange seas and landscapes and the camaraderie, humour and tension of people who live in close proximity and risk their lives day by day.

Blue Meridian

First published 25 years ago, this biography of the Sun King uses contemporary sources to examine what sort of monarch Louis XIV really was. The author's researches reveal a portrait of the man and an account of the principal events of his long reign (1642-1715). The book provides an overview of the entire civilization inspired by and reflecting the glory of the Sun King. Thus, while Louis occupies the foreground, artists like Racine, Moliere, Lully and Mansart, the architect of Versailles, share the middleground with politicians such as Cardinal Mazarin and Nicolas Fouquet and courtiers such as the king's mistress, Louise de La Valliere.

Louis XIV

Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver, who became a master-storyteller of his generation and was hailed in Europe as 'the American Chekhov', wrote of himself: "I began as a poet. My first publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I'd be very pleased if they put 'Poet and short-story writer - and occasional essayist', in that order." 
 
This complete edition allows readers to experience the range and overwhelming power of Carver's poetry for the first time. It brings together in the order of their American publication the poems of Fires (1985), Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1986), Ultramarine (1988), A New Path to the Waterfall (1989) and No Heroics, Please (1991). 
 
For readers who know Carver's middle period only through his selected poems, In a Marine Light (1988), it includes the windfall of 51 poems not previously published in Britain. All of Us is edited by Professor William L. Stull of the University of Hartford, and introduced with an essay on Raymond Carver's methods of composition by his widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.

All of Us

The Collected Poems

Almudena Solana

This is the story of Aurora Ortiz, who lives in Madrid, and who, at the age of only thirty, has been widowed and needs to find a job. Although she is in no position to choose, she would ideally like to work as a caretaker in a quiet block of flats where she would just watch life pass by. Aurora's aspirations are simple and few, and with the help of her neighbour and friend Fany, who lends her a computer, she composes what she considers a suitable curriculum vitae and proceeds to tramp the streets of the city in search of work. With her vitality and freshness, her innocence, her unconventional intelligence and her relative lack of commercial ambition, Aurora Ortiz is a new type of heroine, one whose ethos and view of the world run contrary to most contemporary trends, she is a character who might have emerged from one of Pedro Almod-var's films.  The means by which she comes to terms with the burden and pressures of modern life will strike chords with many of her own European generation.

The Curriculum Vitae of Aurora Ortiz

C. K. Stead

"Will appeal to lovers of the wayward novel game as it is played by Lawrence Sterne or Italo Calvino" - Jackie Wullschläger, Financial Times 
 
Professor Harry Butler is obsessed with the Mind/Body problem. Unfortunately, this is not the least of his problems. Harry's wife has turned his study into a sufi shrine where she sits cross-legged and chants for hours on end: "I am not this body..." And Harry doesn't know it yet but the Drug Squad have taken up residence in his kitchen so as to observe the movements of his neighbours and their visitors. Among these visitors, photographed by the drug squad, is one of his oldest friends. And living next door is a woman Harry may have had an encounter with in Singapore. 
 
The University is no escape from these complications on the domestic front: Harry's relationship with a student is causing concern among the Philosophy Department Women's Collective. Some of his colleagues also suspect him of going astray academically. 
 
The story takes place in Auckland, New Zealand. But who is telling the story? Why is he in Europe? Why does he keep moving from one city to another, and why does he seem to require the presence of a certain Uta Haverstrom in order to write it? 
 
The Death of the Body is a delightful blend of wit, intelligence and excitement.

Death Of The Body

Thomas Glavinic

In Vienna, in the winter of 1910, the world of chess is aghast and the city abuzz. The unthinkable has happened: in the fifth round of the World Championship the renowned defending champion, Emanuel Lasker, has made an elementary error and lost a match. The little-known Austrian challenger, Carl Haffner, stands in the limelight, the title within his grasp. 
 
Haffner is a shy and fragile man, brought up in extreme poverty, from which his only escape is his exceptional gift for chess. His is a game shaped by the harsh experiences he has undergone. He has an obsessive fear of defeat, and his tactics and overall strategy are based on the sheer artistry of defence. But this confrontation with Lasker is not merely a clash between rook and knight; it is a collision between two men with vastly differing attitudes to life: the wealthy, worldly, self-confident champion on the one hand, the lonely, idealistic and penniless Haffner on the other. 
 
Carl Haffner is modelled on the Austrian grandmaster Karl Schlechter, and in his brilliant first novel Thomas Glavinic brings to life both the events surrounding the ten-match world championship and the atmosphere of the cafés and chess clubs of Vienna and Berlin in the years before the First World War. With mature insight, he analyses the reasons for Haffner's view of the world, a world that is thrown into further confusion by the appearance of the fascinating and beautiful Anna.

Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw

Suzanne Brogger

Beginning with the great-grandfather Isidor Levin and his emigration from Poland in the 19th century, his establishment of The Royal Danish Distillery - creators of the famous Danish snaps - and the family's successful assimilation in Denmark, the story follows the children and grandchildren, as they look for successes in Denmark and abroad, in business and within the arts. 
 
Suzanne Brogger's family saga takes us from Denmark to Riga and back, through two World Wars, to India and Afghanistan, to America as it was and as it is, and it takes us through boarding schools, mental hospitals, and almshouses for the poor. At the heart of the narrative is the grandmother, Katze, and her memories. She tells the story from her patrician apartment in Copenhagen's Gammel M-nt 14, where she has lived since the 1940s, and her story is a haunting portrait of the pride, conceitedness, grandness, and despair, that has followed the Levin family while the world outside the old apartment gradually fell apart. The family remains prey to drug addiction and suicide attempts. Some escape into sex, others into evangelical politics or religion. Regn becomes a UN diplomat in the Third World, his wife tries to kill their son, while their daughter serves her sexual apprenticeship in a Thai monastery-brothel and after a brief period of social acceptability, ends her days a bag lady in Copenhagen. 
 
As diverse and uncompromising as William Styron's Sophie's Choice and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. To have conjured up a cast of grotesques and rendered them sympathetic is a challenge that Suzanne Brogger has triumphantly brought off. .

The Jade Cat

A tale of greed, hatred and decay from Turkey's legendary novelist Yashar Kemal 
 
Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brings to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. 
 
In a sudden, chance encounter in a coffee-house in a fishing village near Istanbul, Zeynel Celik shoots a local gangster. Only one man intervenes – the village outcast Fisher Selim – and in doing so inadvertently transfers the blame for the murder onto himself. From this one simple act, Zeynel becomes a legendary outlaw in the minds of the people, whereas Fisher Selim, passionate about the sea and haunted by a lost love, is cast as an eccentric oddball. Each is pursued by his own paranoia, memories of the past and hopes for the future, until their paths cross once again on Selim’s boat, and their obsessions come to a resolution. Reflective and lyrical, the novel offers insight into the Turkish mentality while drawing universally valid conclusions, and manages to be both brutally savage and deeply humane.

The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

Henry Green

Old Mr Rock, a widower, lives in a cottage with his granddaughter Elizabeth; his household includes Daisy the pig, Ted the goose and Alice the cat, but an additional member threatens in the person of Sebastian Birt, the schoolteacher whom Elizabeth wants to marry. Birt teaches in the state institution for girls run by two authoritarian spinsters, the inseparable Misses Edge and Baker. 
 
One sunny summer's morning, the morning of the Founders' Day Ball, as Mr Rock goes up to the school to fetch his pig-swill for Daisy, it is discovered that two of the girls have gone missing in the night. As he pursues the unfolding events of this crowded day and eavesdrops on the conversations up at the school and down at the cottage, Henry Green subtly teases out all the hidden ambitions and lusts, the suspicions and jealousies that are rife just beneath the placid surface of the institution. With an unmatched ear for dialogue and an absolute mastery in the depiction of character, he imbues this apparently routine school day with a powerful charge of drama and superb comic effect.

Concluding

Jaan Kross

Translated by Eric Dickens 
 
Treading Air follows the life of Ullo Paerand through 30 years of violent political upheaval. Abandoned by his father as a child, he grows up to become an electoral assistant to the parliamentary office in Tallinn and it is in this position that Ullo witnesses first the Soviet and then the German occupation of Estonia. Forced out of his honest profession Ullo becomes involved with the Resistance but, when many Estonians flee the country, he chooses to remain. An interlude of a decade shows much has changed since the end of the War; Soviet influence is marked in the style of government and the manner of the people. The narrative unfolds in stories imparted to an unknown "author" by a 70-year-old Ullo. Just before the end, however, Kross introduces a teasing ambiguity: Ullo dies before he is able to answer the last question about his life.

Treading Air

Torgny Lindgren

No doubt about it, Lindgren has joined the ranks of the greatest writers" Michel Crepu, La Croix 
 
The woman had come from a city in the south to lecture in a small village amid the snowbound forests of northern Sweden. She was a writer. After the lecture in the village hall an old man who had been sleeping at the back introduced himself, as she was to be his guest for the night. So it was that she moved in with Hadar, a man who lived on his own and was in the last stages of cancer. Not another house in sight, save for one just a field away; there lived Hadar's brother Olof, also on his own, and dying of heart disease. Neither brother would consent to die, the woman discovered, for that would give the other the satisfaction of outliving him. 
 
Cut off by a snow blizzard, the woman settles into Hadar's attic, leaving only to pick her way across to Olof's, and in the days that follows she acts as both nurse and confessor to each of them. She learns of the woman they shared and the son of disputed paternity, uncovering the tissue of lies and self-deceptions that keeps the ailing brothers alive in a bond of mutual loathing. Ultimately to her roles of nurse and confessor she adds a third: the hand of Providence . . . 
 
The author of The Way of a Serpent and Light is one of Sweden's outstanding practitioners of black humour. In Sweetness he has achieved a work of brilliant comic invention.

Sweetness

Jorge Amado

The sleepy Brazilian beach resort of Periperi needs a hero. As if in answer to their calll, Captain Vasco Moscosco de Aragao (newly retired) arrives and soon has the townspeople enthralled with his tales of ocean-going daring and romance. 
 
Only his rival, Chico Pacheco, delves into the captain's past and discovers that he has never in his life sailed beyond the harbour bar. But just as Vasco is about to be unmaksked the Ita limps into port with her flag at half mast and her captain dead at the wheel. Pressed into service, Vasco goes to meet his destiny and so begins an adventure in love and seamanship that surpasses even his wildest fantasies.

Home Is The Sailor

L Jorge

The setting of this extraordinary novel is an old farmhouse in Portugal - a house far enough from the Atlantic not to hear the breaking waves during a storm but near enough for the walls to be corroded by the salt in the air. 
 
With most members of her large family having left the hardship of life in this landscape of sand and stone for jobs in faraway places, a young woman struggles to piece together her past from the many and differing stories she is told. Left behind by a free-spirited, feckless father, a seducer with a talent for drawing, she is raised by her uncle who has married her mother. The only memories of her father's one brief visit are the echoes of his footsteps on the stairs leading to her room. The only signs of him are letters from the widest reaches of the world- letters accompanied by brilliantly coloured drawings of exotic birds: the cuckoo from India, the ibis from Mozambique, the goose from Labrador, the hummingbird from the West Indies. The daughter longs for her father and, as she grows up, she is determined to find him and uncover the truth. 
 
Beautifully written and imagined, this strikingly lyrical novel evokes the atmosphere of a rural community in a changing world and explores the timeless themes of family, independence, and the often painful experience of emigration.

The Migrant Painter of Birds

Shortly before he died, America's laureate of the dispossessed made his own selection from his short stories, revised the texts and published them in this authorative edition. 
 
The stories in Where I'm Calling From are selected from the full range of the author's work including Furious Seasons, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, and Cathedral and include all seven stories from his last collection, Elephant.

Where I'm Calling From

The Selected Stories

Christine Jordis

Relying on atmosphere and sensation over fact and statistic, Christine Jordis has written a deeply personal, vividly impressionistic account of several journeys to the Indonesian islands of Bali and Java. Dazzled, wide-eyed, but always astute, Jordis describes famous monuments, native dances, encounters with locals. She conjures up the various literary and artistic figures who sought refuge and inspiration in Indonesia - Arthur Rimbaud, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad - and brings ancient legends to life. From the heart of the lush tropical forests, Jordis guides her readers through the technicolor paradise that makes Paris seem grey in comparison. Ultimately, it is these very colours that infuse her life - and her readers' lives - with new meaning.

Bali, Java in My Dreams

Madam De La Tour Du Pin

'A story of a simple but straightforward woman, caught up in the complications of the French Revolution' Economist 
 
 
Madame de la Tour du Pin was born Henrietta-Lucy Dillon in Paris in 1770. An aristocrat, she spent her youth surrounded by wealth and luxury. In regular attendance at Marie Antoinette's Sunday courts, she was, by her own account, 'outstanding in any gathering', rivalling even the Queen in beauty. 
 
At the age of 16 she is given curtseying lessons by her dancing master and is hastily married to the future Marquis de la Tour du Pin. A life of pleasure-seeking and extravagance begins, but is rudely cut short by the storming of the Bastille. 
 
Written for her only surviving child, this intimate record of her life recounts the terrible fate that awaited all those who attended the Court of Louis XVI during the years of the French Revolution. Throughout France appears the terrifying silhouette of a rival Madame - Madame Guillotine - and, because of her beauty, Madame de la Tour du Pin is frequently prey to the now deadly compliment of being mistaken for the Queen. 
 
When the king is executed, she flees Paris to travel round France, only to discover that her many properties have been plundered. When it becomes too dangerous to remain on native soil she leaves for Holland - thence to America and to England - in search of a new life, but her heart remains in Paris, whither eventually she returns, a dispossessed émigré. 
 
Written with great intelligence, compassion and wit, the Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin provide us with a uniquely female perspective on the French Revolution. It is a valuable historical document, made all the more affecting by the author's sense of a bright and beautiful world cruelly snatched away by the forces of history.

Memoirs

Laughing And Dancing Our Way to the Precipice

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

After his expulsion from Russia in 1974 for undermining the Communist regime, Solzhenitsyn wrote a secret record, while it was still fresh in his mind, of the courageous efforts of people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West. Before the fall of Communism he could not have published Invisible Allies in conjunction with his memoir The Oak and the Calf without putting those friends in jeopardy. Now the facts may be revealed in this intimate account of the network of individuals who risked life and liberty to ensure that his works were concealed, circulated in "samizdat", and exported via illicit channels. 
 
These conspirators, often unknown to one another, shared a devotion to the dissident writer's work and a hatred of an oppressive regime of censorship and denunciation. The circle was varied enough to include scholars and fellow writers, and also elderly babushkas who acted as couriers. With tenderness, respect and humour, Solzhenitsyn speaks of these partners in conspiracy: the women who typed copies of his works under the noses of prying neighbours; the journalists and diplomats who covertly carried microfilms across borders; the friends who hid various drafts of his works from the vigilance of the secret police.

Invisible Allies

William Watson

In the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Acre in 1291 and the reconquest of the Holy Land by the Moslems, the last survivors of the Order of the Temple make their bloody retreat from the Middle East. Loading the treasure of their Order into a decrepit, leaky vessel, they set sail for Europe, where, unbeknownst to them, King Philip of France plots their destruction. 
 
Among their number is Beltran, a native of the Holy Land, who has led the life of a soldier-monk for the past thirty years. World-weary yet incorruptible, Beltran is guardian both of the treasure and the Rule of the Order. As his companions' loyalties waver, he struggles to keep the faith, only to witness the end of the Order as the Templars are thrown to the Inquisition and their Grand Master burned at the stake.

The Last Of The Templars

The fitting and devastating finale of the acclaimed The Wind from the Plain trilogy 
 
Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brought to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. The Wind from the Plain trilogy is widely seen as his masterpiece, alongside the legendary Memed My Hawk. 
 
Three men are caught in a triangle of politics. Memidik, a young hunter, is obsessed by an urge to kill the tyrannous headman, Sefer, who has caused him so much pain and humiliation. Yet, each time he treis, he is overcome by fear. Then the accidental death of another man in the community fires him with renewed determination. Sefer, meanwhile, is sentenced to solitude and the local champion, Tashbash, is invested with mythical powers. 
 
The web of fantasy and intrigue spun around the villagers enmeshes them in plots of bravery and illusion in this extraordinary story of survival.

The Undying Grass

Part One in the acclaimed The Wind from the Plain trilogy 
 
Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brought to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. The Wind from the Plains trilogy is widely seen as his masterpiece, alongside the legendary Memed My Hawk. 
 
Each year the wind brings the news to old Halil's keen senses that the cotton is ripe for picking in the plain, and at his word the entire population of his remote village in the Taurus Mountains set out on the arduous trek. 
 
 
But this year old Halil finds himself too old to go on foot; so does Long Ali's aging mother, Meryemdje, and both clamour for a place on the back of Long Ali's broken-down nag, scarcely capable of bearing either of the two old people. Halil's determination to stay on and Meryemdje's to get him off lead to a war of words and cunning which lights with delicious comedy the sombre drama of the march. But when the decrepit animal finally dies, and the group falls behind the rest of the villagers, it is the unfortunate Ali who has to show piety towards his mother and compassion to old Halil, while pressing on with dogged resolution to reach the cotton fields before they are picked bare. 
 
The power of The Wind from the Plain, the first volume of The Wind from the Plain trilogy, lies in its simplicity, which in turn lies in the handful of unforgettable characters whose story it tells - the timeless one of survival.

The Wind From The Plain

Ray Desmond

This informative volume traces the extraordinary evolution over more than two centuries of Kew's historic landscape, which began with two private royal gardens and expanded through the work of some of our most distinguished garden designers and architects, resulting in an important range of listed buildings of which thirty-nine have survived. These, together with the latest additions to Kew's architectural heritage, are extensively illustrated and described. As much part of this fascinating landscape are the principal figures in Kew's history - among them Queen Caroline, her son Frederick Prince of Wales, his wife Princess Augusta, and George III; Sir Joseph Banks, who organized the first worldwide plant-collecting expeditions; Sir William Hooker and his son, Sir Joseph, who laid the foundations of the present Botanic Gardens; and successive directors who formulated policy and enabled improvements. 
 
Kew also played a pivotal role in the development of the British Empire's natural resources, the introduction of commercial crops to the colonies and the compilation of colonial floras. Its collaboration with overseas botanical gardens, alongside its establishment as an international scientific institution are equally crucial and examined in detail. Whilst previous accounts of Kew have relied almost entirely on printed sources, the present volume makes extensive use of archives which support modern Kew's primary objective: "the better management of the Earth's environment by increasing knowledge and understanding of the plant kingdom".

A History

Alexander Piatigorsky

This study considers the institution of Freemasonry from the point of view of both masons and their critics, as well as from the author's own. In the first section, it gives an outline of masonic history, from the foundation of the Grand Lodge in Covent Garden in 1717 through its major role in Enlightenment Europe and the American War of Independence, its many tribulations and schisms in the 19th century to the present day. The book looks at one of the main sources of masonic history, Anderson's "Constitutions", which documents masonic practice and the masons' mythical history back to Hiram Abiff, the first Master Mason in the reign of King Solomon.

Freemasonry

The second volume in the acclaimed The Wind from the Plain trilogy 
 
Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brought to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. The Wind from the Plains trilogy is widely seen as his masterpiece, alongside the legendary Memed My Hawk. 
 
After a particularly bad season, a group of poor cotton-pickers are unable to pay their creditor, shopkeeper Adil Effendi. Overwhelmed with shame and guilt, they wait in terror for Adil to come and demand retribution. But when he inexplicably fails to appear, Adil begins to represent an irrational and tyrannical force, growing in their minds until they become sick with apprehension and obsessed with the terrible disaster that is sure to come upon them. 
 
In their despair they turn to Tashbash, a brave, decent and loyal man, investing him with virtue, grace and miraculous power. But the cotton-pickers have no idea of the effect of their idolatry on Tashbash, with his innocent doubts and mental torment, until his fate finally befalls him and the novel draws to its apposite close. Written with deep compassion and lyrical beauty, this is a novel alive with the acute observation of human nature.

Iron Earth, Copper Sky

Ivo Andric

Set in the town of Travnik, Bosnian Chronicle presents the struggle for supremacy in a region that stubbornly refuses to submit to any outsider. The time is Napoleonic and the novel, both in its historical scope and psychological subtlety, is Tolstoyan. Inevitably, in its portrayal of conflict and fierce ethnic loyalties, the story is eerily relevant to readers today. 
 
Ottoman viziers, French consuls, and Austrian plenipotentiaries are consumed by a ceaseless game of diplomacy and double-dealing: expansive and courtly face-to-face, brooding and scheming behind closed doors. As they have for centuries, the Bosnians themselves observe and endure the machinations of greater powers that vie, futilely, to absorb them. Ivo Andric’s masterwork is imbued with the richness and complexity of a region that has brought much tragedy to our century and known so little peace.

Bosnian Chronicle

Matteo Ricci, an early recruit of the Jesuit order, was sent to China as a missionary in 1582. If he approached the Emperor with a Bible in one hand, in the other he carried much of the accumulated technological and philosophical wisdom of the late Renaissance Europe, and thus found favour among the Mandarins, the men of learning who enjoyed high status at the Imperial Court. He learned Chinese the better to discuss with them the problems in science and technology, as also questions of religion and the hereafter. But his progress was not unopposed, for the Wise Man from the West came to be seen as an unsettling element in a too-settled society. Ricci died in 1610, disappointed in his ambition to convert the Emperor, and with him the whole of China, to Christianity. But the seed was sown and the crop, even after almost a century of atheistic communism, continues to grow in present-day China. 
 
This story of the first fully documented contact between West and East offers a fascinating insight into the history of ideas during one of the most fertile eras in European and Chinese history. Vincent Cronin has built up a reputation with his scholarly, elegantly written works of history and biography, as one of the finest popular historians of his generation. This early book proves his gift as an acutely observant and sensitive historian.

Wise Man Of The West

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