The best Indian literature

Excellent condition. PB. 638pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This is a definitive anthology that vividly reveals the greatest writers from the Indian continent.

Spanning 150 years, this collection of fiction and non-fiction shatters many contemporary illusions about Indian writing.

Translations sit alongside writing in English, bringing to light the most engaging writers from modern India, including R.K. Narayan, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie.

The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature is a wonderful collection of the best Indian writing comprising fiction and non-fiction.

A Guantanamo memoir from Britain

 

Mint condition. HB. 196pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This is Ahmed's story. It will make you rethink what it means to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It will also make you look anew at courage, survival, justice and the War on Terror.

On 11 September 2001, in a cafe in London, Ahmed Errachidi watched as the twin towers collapsed. He was appalled by the loss of innocent life. But he couldn't possibly have predicted how much of his own life he too would lose because of that day.

In a series of terrible events, Ahmed was sold by the Pakistanis to the Americans in the diplomatic lounge at Islamabad airport and spent five and a half years in Guantanamo. There, he was beaten, tortured, humiliated, very nearly destroyed.

But Ahmed did not give in. This very ordinary, Moroccan-born London chef became a leader of men. Known by the authorities as The General, he devised protests and resistance by any means possible. As a result, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement. But then, after all those years, Ahmed was freed, his innocence admitted.

This is Ahmed's story. It will make you rethink what it means to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It will also make you look anew at courage, survival, justice and the War on Terror.

SOLD The great battle for Australia

 

SOLD

Excellent condition. PB. 602pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

In a unique and balanced portrayal, renowned journalist Paul Ham recounts both the Australian and Japanese perspectives of the events on the hellish Papuan jungle trail where thousands fought and died during World War II.

Based on extensive research in Australia and Japan, and including previously unpublished documents, Kokoda intimately relates the stories of ordinary soldiers in 'the world's worst killing field', and examines the role of commanders in sending ill-equipped, unqualified Australian troops into battles that resulted in near 100 per cent casualty rates.

It was a war without mercy, fought back and forth along 90 miles (145 km) of river crossings, steep inclines and precipitous descents, with both sides wracked by hunger and disease, and terrified of falling into enemy hands. Defeat was unthinkable: the Australian soldier was fighting for his homeland against an unyielding aggressor; the Japanese ordered to fight to the death in a bid to conquer 'Greater East Asia'.

Paul Ham captures the spirits of those soldiers and commanders who clashed in this war of exceptional savagery, and tells of the brave souls on both sides of the campaign whose courage and sacrifices must never be forgotten.

About the Author

Paul Ham is the author of the highly acclaimed Kokoda (HarperCollins, 2004) and the Australia correspondent of the London Sunday Times.

He was born and educated in Australia and lives in Sydney, having spent several years working in Britain as a journalist and publisher.

SOLD Indonesia, religion and politics in one volume

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 374pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Following the Bali bombings, Australia suddenly found itself in the middle of a war of terror that gripped the world. Worse still, it was a war with an enemy we never knew we had - an enemy we're still struggling to identify and understand. Even worse, we neglected to understand that this enemy was one we shared with Indonesia itself.

RESERVED The Indian History of Cricket

 

Excellent condition. PB. 496pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

C. K. Nayudu and Sachin Tendulkar naturally figure in this book, but so too, in arresting and unexpected ways, do Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The Indian careers of those great English cricketers, Lord Harris and D. R. Jardine, provide a window into the operations of Empire.

The extraordinary life of India's first great slow bowler, Palwankar Baloo, introduces the reader to the still-unfinished struggle against caste discrimination.

Later chapters explore the competition between Hindu and Muslim cricketers in colonial India and the extraordinary passions now provoked when India plays Pakistan.

An important, pioneering work, essential for anyone interested in cricket and India, A Corner of a Foreign Field is also a beautifully written meditation on the ramifications of sport in society at large, and how sport can influence both social and political history.

SOLD Encounters between the British Empire and its eastern subjects

 

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Mint condition. PB. 404pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Talented historian Maya Jasonoff offers an alternative history of the British Empire. It is not about conquest -- but rather a collection of startling and fascinating personal accounts of cross-cultural exchange from those who found themselves on the edges of Empire.

A Palladian mansion filled with Western art in the centre of old Calcutta, the Mughal Emperor's letters in an archive in the French Alps, the names of Italian adventurers scratched into the walls of Egyptian temples: in this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff delves into the stories behind artefacts like these to uncover the lives of collectors in India and Egypt who lived on the frontiers of European empire.

Edge of Empire traces their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire tells a story about the making of European empires, ones that break away from the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance, to delve into the personal dimensions of imperialism.

She asks what people brought to imperial frontiers and what they took away, and what motives drove them, whether ambition, opportunism, curiosity or greed. This rich and compelling book enters a world where people lived, loved and died, and identified with each other across cultures much more than our prejudices about 'Empire' might suggest.

About the Author

Maya Jasanoff was born in 1974. She graduated from Harvard before earning her Masters degree at Cambridge University. Her PhD was completed at Yale. She is now Professor of British History at the University of Virginia. She is widely known for her pioneering work on the study of Empire.

SOLD Travels through Istanbul

 

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Mint condition. PB. 396pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Istanbul: A Traveller's Reader is an wide-ranging and carefully chosen selection of writings, offering a richly layered view of Byzantine Constantinople and Turkish Istanbul. During the thousand-year Byzantine empire that followed its founding by Constantine the Great, Istanbul became a city of fabled riches; after falling to the Turks in 1453, its glories continued, maintained by the strength and wealth of the Ottomans.

Drawing on diaries, letters, biographies, travelogues and poems from the sixth century AD onwards, this evocative anthology recreates for contemporary visitors the vanished glories of Constantinople. It provides vivid eyewitness accounts of the coronation of a Byzantine emperor; the funeral of a sultan; the triumphal entry of Mehmet the Conqueror; the building of the Suleymaniye, the most magnificent of the city's mosques; and the death of Ataturk in 1938.

It also describes the rampant sexual exploits of the Byzantine empress-to-be Theodora; the public execution of a Turkish wife and her young, Christian lover; the near execution of an envoy given the unenviable task of transporting a large organ from England to Constantinople in 1599, a gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III, who was caught admiring the sultan's personal harem; and the unfortunate Frenchman caught drinking wine and eating a pork sausage while sketching in Hagia Sophia in the 1680s.

About the Author

Laurence Kelly is the editor of the Traveller's Reader series. Born in Brussels and educated at New College, Oxford, where he read history, he joined the Life Guards in 1950 and served in the Foreign Office. His interest in all things Turkish began in 1946 when he first visited Ankara and Istanbul whilst his father was in Turkey as British Ambassador.

Reporting from war zones across the world

 

Excellent condition. PB. 622pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

War is hell. It is also suffering, courage, fear, nobility, depravity, honor, death. War in all its aspects, from the tragic to the horrific to the heroic, is vividly depicted in this riveting volume of dispatches by established authors like Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway, who turned their literary hand to, respectively, the Spanish-American War, Boer War, Spanish Civil War, and D-Day 1944, as well as professional news correspondents like Ernie Pyle, Alan Moorehead, Peter Arnett, and John Hersey, who made something like art out of war reportage.

Eyewitness accounts of other writers among the one hundred in this volume include William L. Shirer's on the surrender of the French in World War II, Edward R. Murrow's on the London Blitz, Alexander Werth's on the siege of Leningrad, and Martha Gellhorn's on the Battle of the Bulge.

Found here, too, are David Halberstrom's Pulitzer Prize-winning piece on the coup against Diem, Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre, and John Pilger on the last day in Saigon.

Not only did these men and women brave the dangers of war; they also combated often obstructive military officers and disingenuous politicians to get their story and to report the truth as they saw it.

Beginning with William Howard Russell's reports from Crimea, which mark the birth of war reportage, and ending on the battle lines in Bosnia, here is war -- what it looks like, what it means, and how it has been fought for 150 years.

The Penguin Book of Australian War Writing

 

Mint condition. HB. 449pp. $30 including postage anywhere in Australia.

From the cliffs of Gallipoli, to the jungles of Vietnam, to the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq, Australia's short history has been punctuated by war.

We define ourselves through our relationship to the battlefield - mateship, courage under fire, larrikinism - but few of us have been firsthand witnesses to these scenes.

Soldiers writing from the front and journalists on the ground have shaped the way we think about war, and thereby the way we think about ourselves.

In this remarkable collection from author and journalist Mark Dapin, the crackling immediacy of this war writing will command your attention and open your eyes.

SOLD A history of political violence

 

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Mint condition. HB. 726pp. $28 including postage anywhere in Australia.

These were the crimes that were meant to change the world, and sometimes did.

The book connects the killing of the Kennedys or the murder that sparked the First World War with less well-known stories, such as the Berlin shooting of an instigator of the Armenian genocide or the attack on an American 'robber baron'.

Taking in Malcolm X and Queen Victoria, Adolf Hitler and Andy Warhol, Charles Manson and Emma Goldman, Tsars, Presidents, and pop stars, Age of Assassins traces the process that turned thought into action and murder into an icon.

In tackling the history of political violence, the book is unique in its range and attention to detail, summoning up an age of assassination that is far from over.

Hilarious guide to surviving an apocalypse

 

Excellent condition. PB. 246pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Ultimate Fighter champ Forrest Griffin and Erich Krauss, who previously brought you the New York Times bestseller Got Fight, now offer a hilarious and very timely guide to surviving the coming apocalypse.

Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down provides everything an aspiring Mad Max needs to know about post-apocalyptic living.

Since it’s coming soon anyway, we might as well all Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down.

Married to the mafia

 

Very good condition. PB. 310pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

When Lynda Lustig met Louie Milito, she was a sixteen-year-old high-school dropout with a taste for adventure and an agonizing childhood.

When they were married two years later, he was not yet a "made man" in the powerful Gambino crime family. Louie was a hairdresser who dabbled in petty thievery.

But Lynda was so happy to be out of her domineering mother's loveless house. And over the years, she was willing to forgive her husband for anything: his violent rages, his frequent absences, his shady associates, and the blood on his hands.

For twenty-four years Lynda Milito remained loyal to this charming and dangerous criminal -- her children's father and close friend of crime boss John Gotti and underboss Sammy "the Bull" Gravano.

But in 1988, Louie Milito disappeared, murdered by the very people he had always trusted to protect him.

A crime story, a family story, a love story, "Mafia Wife" is the shockingly intimate, brutally honest tale of a survivor -- and of the life she lived in the dark bosom of the underworld.

Stories of Australian midwives

 

Excellent condition. PB. 245pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Funny one minute and heartbreaking the next, Aussie Midwives explores the joys, emotion and drama of childbirth and the lasting effect it has on the people who work in this extraordinary profession.

'Being present as the midwife at a baby's birth is one of life's glorious adventures.'

Nineteen Australian midwives share their incredible stories with passionate midwife and bestselling author Fiona McArthur.

Midwives play a vital role in supporting women through some of the most challenging and rewarding moments of their lives.

These remarkable professionals watch over births across Australia from the remote outback to busy urban hospitals.

Meet Annie, working on the tiny island of Saibai where mothers arrive by dinghy; Kate, a clinical midwifery consultant, who sees women with high-risk pregnancies; Priscilla and Jillian who fly thousands of miles to get mothers and babies to hospital safely with the Royal Flying Doctor Service; and Louise, who gives impromptu consultations in the aisles of the local supermarket.

Funny one minute and heartbreaking the next, Aussie Midwives explores the joys, emotion and drama of childbirth and the lasting effect it has on the people who work in this extraordinary profession.

SOLD Unorthodox memoir

 

SOLD

Excellent condition. PB. 258pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Unorthodox is the bestselling memoir of a young Jewish woman’s escape from a religious sect, in the tradition of Carolyn Jessop’s Escape.

As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read.

Yet in spite of her repressive upbringing, Deborah grew into an independent-minded young woman whose stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped her to imagine an alternative way of life among the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Trapped as a teenager in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she barely knew, the tension between Deborah’s desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until she gave birth at nineteen and realized that, regardless of the obstacles, she would have to forge a path—for herself and her son—to happiness and freedom.

Remarkable and fascinating, this “sensitive and memorable coming-of-age story” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) is one you won’t be able to put down.

Parents, children and identity

 

Mint condition. PB. 960pp. $30 including postage anywhere in Australia.

**WINNER OF THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2014**

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Sometimes your child - the most familiar person of all - is radically different from you. The saying goes that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But what happens when it does?

Drawing on interviews with over three hundred families, covering subjects including deafness, dwarfs, Down's Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, children born of rape, children convicted of crime and transgender people, Andrew Solomon documents ordinary people making courageous choices.

Difference is potentially isolating, but Far from the Tree celebrates repeated triumphs of human love and compassion to show that the shared experience of difference is what unites us.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-fiction and eleven other national awards. Winner of the Green Carnation Prize.

SOLD Traveling through and reporting from Indonesia

 

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Mint condition. PB. 404pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A compelling, entertaining and fascinating journey through one of the world's largest, most dynamic and most contradictory countries.

In 1945, Indonesia's declaration of independence promised: 'the details of the transfer of power etc. will be worked out as soon as possible.' Still working on the 'etc.' seven decades later, the world's fourth most populous nation is now enthusiastically democratic and riotously diverse.

Over 65 million Indonesians use Facebook, though 80 million live without electricity. It is one of the richest and most enchanting countries on earth, but is riddled, too, with ineptitude and corruption.

Elizabeth Pisani, who first worked in Indonesia 25 years ago as a foreign correspondent and came back a decade later as a medical researcher, set out in 2011 to rediscover its enduring attraction, and to find the links which bind together this impossibly disparate nation.

She travelled over 13,000 miles by land and sea, dropping in on local potentates and staying with farmers and fishermen, and nomads and nurses, often on islands too small to appear on a map.

In Indonesia Etc., Pisani weaves together the stories of Indonesians encountered on her journey with a considered analysis of Indonesia's recent history, corrupt political system, ethnic and religious identities, stifling bureaucracy and traditional 'sticky' cultures.

Fearless and funny, and sharply perceptive, she has drawn a compelling, entertaining and deeply informed portrait of a captivating nation.

About the Author

ELIZABETH PISANI was Indonesia correspondent for Reuters and the Economist from 1988 to 1991. She worked with Indonesia's Ministry of Health from 2001 to 2005 as an epidemiologist, and spent 2011 travelling the archipelago. Pisani is the author of The Wisdom of Whores (Granta, 2008), and speaks several languages, including Indonesian.

Travels in Iran

 

PB. 415pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Filling a long-neglected gap in the travel writing of the region, "Mirrors of the Unseen" is a rare and timely portrait of the nation descended from the world's earliest superpower: Iran.

Animated by the same spirit of exploration as its acclaimed predecessor, "An Unexpected Light, " and drawing on several years of independent travel and research, this thought-provoking work weaves together observations of life in contemporary Iran with history, politics, and a penetrating enquiry into the secrets of Islamic art.

Generously illustrated with the author's own sketches and photographs, "Mirrors of the Unseen" is a rich, sensitive, and vivid account of a country and its culture.

Jason Elliot lives in London. His first book, "An Unexpected Light": "Travels in Afghanistan," was a "New York Times" bestseller. In our current climate of war and suspicion, Iran is depicted as a "rogue" nation, defined by the radical pronouncements of its leaders.

But such rhetoric obscures the real Iran: an ancient culture, both sophisticated and isolated, which acknowledges "an invisible world, from which the soul receives a more rarefied nourishment."

Jason Elliot has spent the past three years traveling in Iran, and in this book he reveals the many sides of this misunderstood country. In "Mirrors of the Unseen," we are introduced to the urban contradictions of the capital, Tehran, and invited to ponder the sublime architecture of Isfahan; we travel with Elliot on horseback through the forests of the north, across the bleak landscapes of Kurdistan, and retrace Byron's steps to such fables monuments are the tower of Qabus, the palace of Firuzabad, and Persepolis.

“Mirrors of the Unseen" is travel writing that includes history, anecdote, and provocative analysis, as well as the author's own photographs.

“Elliot reports on the 'double life' of the Persians he meets, who unanimously denounce the ruling mullahs. One insists that you're nobody in Iran if you haven't been imprisoned; another rolls his eyes at the author's obsessive trawling of mosques, protesting, 'People will think I'm with a fanatic.' The book is replete with historical arcana . . . ruminations on the 'turbulent calligraphies' of Islamic architecture, and labyrinthine footnotes . . . Elliot is a travel writer of the old school: untethered to an itinerary, eager to be led astray, and as ardent an observer of the experience of traveling as of his destination."--"The New Yorker"

“Around his account of many months of travel, and sustained by extensive reading in libraries, Elliot] aims to build nothing less than a cohesive idea of Iran's artistic development . . . Elliot's roving gaze holds an advantage for the reader. By consulting this single volume, one can learn about Cyrus the Great's Achaemenid Empire--and Herodotus's Hellenic-centered account of it--and about the consequences of the Arab conquest of the seventh century, which turned Iran . . . from a Zoroastrian into a Mulsim nation. He] describes the later Mongol devastations and gives much attention to the Safavid Empire that flowered after 1600, when Shiism, Islam's main minority sect, came to occupy the position of political and cultural dominance in Persia."--Christopher de Bellaigue, "The New York Times Book Review"

“Though fascinated by the past, the author has a knack for meeting characters, often eccentric, who tell just the right stories: an American expatriate quietly breeding miniature horses thought extinct; a brilliant conversationalist recalling the day an Iraqi missile crashed through the roof of her Tehran kitchen; assorted taxi drivers, hoteliers and intellectuals revealing essential aspects of the national character. What the reader learns of Iran is mostly positive, but by no means sugar-coated; some of the adventures presented here are for the stout-hearted only. A tempering treatise, one hopes, for those rushing to make war on Iran--and an education for those trying to stop them."--"Kirkus Reviews"

“Briton Elliot is the author of the beautifully written "An Unexpected Light": "Travels in Afghanistan," in which his trips to that war-torn country were relived with graphic detail and trenchant understanding. His new book, equally stylish and meaty and compassionate, documents his journeys around another uneasy country. Elliot went to Iran for the purpose of writing another travel book, his desire to witness contemporary Iranian society in light of the shadow but also inspiration cast over it by the wealth of ancient Persian culture. No year in Provence, this author's traveling experiences will make armchair travelers gulp at the lack of creature comforts; on the other hand, splendid visual evidence of political and religious pasts will perhaps stir that very armchair traveler into ticket-holding action. Elliot visited the major cities as well as the smaller ones; his journeys took him over hill and dale. He knows Iranian history and culture, obviously, and equally obvious is his good sense, in composing travel literature, to smoothly integrate factual background into swiftly moving narrative foreground."--Brad Hooper,