SOLD Travels through the Hindu Kush mountains

 

SOLD

PB. 400pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

High up in the Hindu Kush, between the ancient pagan Kalash people and the new medievalists of the Taliban, a charismatic young Spaniard, Jordi Magraner, made his home, mastering the local languages and customs before meeting his death in the most mysterious way. In this magisterial book, Gabi Martinez sets off in Jordi's footsteps to the land of the giants in order to try to solve the riddle of this murder and of Jordi's life.

Jordi Magraner was a brilliant student of the natural world, whose lab was the ravine and the scarp and the tent. His observational investigations led him to places where the legendary barmanu had been sighted, and he began to develop a thesis about the life of the wild man. His passion for pursuit and discovery took him onto ever more perilous terrain in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands. And, one by one, Jordi turned his back on the Europeans who sought to assist him, preferring instead to entrust his safety to an Afghan youth fleeing the Taliban, and to a wondrous working dog called Fjord.

Jordi sought other rewards, and followed a winding, rocky path, down which Gabi Martinez resourcefully tracks him on this enthralling journey of detection and adventure in the Himalayas - where the truth is never as clear and pristine as the majestic mountains and the fast-flowing streams.

Coming of age in post-9/11 Afghanistan

 

Rare book. PB. 339pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Akbar recounts his pilgrimage to his home country with precocious wisdom and insight, taking readers from palaces to prisons and from Kabul to the borderlands in a revealing portrait of a country in the midst of a historic transition.

How occupation flooded Afghanistan with narcotics

 

Mint condition. PB. 464pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

An in-depth investigation into the heroin trade in Afghanistan—including who runs it, who's profiting, and who's lives are caught in the balance
 
Afghanistan has become the world's largest producer of opium and its offshoot, heroin—all under the noses of Western civil and military stakeholders. 

At the nexus of the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, truth is as elusive and fragile as the new democracy itself, now on the brink of being consumed by an expanding mire of chaos. 

Stranger in a strange land, Gregor Salmon entered the war-torn country alone and spent eight months investigating Afghanistan's dependence on poppy, investigating questions such as: Who depends on poppy profits? And who pays the ultimate cost? 

Along the way he encountered Afghans whose lives were intimately tied to the trade: farmers, harvesters, eradicators, smugglers, police, doctors, addicts, warlords, gun-runners, politicians—even a pop-song loving Taliban commander. 

The result is a tense, fascinating, and deeply moving journey along the narcotics trail, and a story about keeping your sanity in a senseless world.

Seeking refuge in Australia from the Taliban

 

Mint condition. PB. 270pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif traces an Afghani refugee's extraordinary journey – from his early life as a shepherd boy in the mountains of Northern Afghanistan, to his forced exile after being captured and tortured by the Taliban, to incarceration in an Australian detention centre ... and finally, to freedom.

SOLD History of modern conflict in Afghanistan

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 

Jon Lee Anderson reports from Afghanistan

 

Rare book. PB. Excellent condition. 224pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The New Yorker correspondent and author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life shares a series of reports from Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, describing a dangerous world of violence, feudal society, conspiracy, religious fanaticism, hardship, and war.

SOLD Afghanistan's history repeating the present

 

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Mint condition. PB. 567pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A towering history of the first Afghan War by bestselling historian William Dalrymple

In the spring of 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan for the first time.

Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed shakos, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes and re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk.

On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion.

The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the nineteenth century: an entire army of the then most powerful nation in the world ambushed in retreat and utterly routed by poorly equipped tribesmen.

Return of a King is the definitive analysis of the First Afghan War, told through the lives of unforgettable characters on all sides and using for the first time contemporary Afghan accounts of the conflict.

Prize-winning and bestselling historian William Dalrymple's masterful retelling of Britain's greatest imperial disaster is a powerful and important parable of colonial ambition and cultural collision, folly and hubris, for our times.

About the Author

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, The Age of Kali, White Mughals, The Last Mughal and, most recently, Nine Lives.

He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d'Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone Crossword Award and has three times been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

In 2012 he was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University.

He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.

SOLD Travels in Afghanistan

 

SOLD

Excellent condition. PB. 496pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

An Unexpected Light, Travels in Afghanistan was greeted on publication by universal critical acclaim and is now widely acknowledged as the most influential contemporary work of Afghanistan. Written on the eve of 9/11, at the height of Afghanistan’s isolation from the world, Jason Elliot’s uncannily prescient account of his winter journey through the country torn by civil war is as pertinent today as it was then.

Winner of the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award in the UK and a New York Times Bestseller in the USA, it recounts the author’s daring and passionate investigation into an extraordinary culture, first as a clandestine guest of the mujahiddin during the Soviet occupation, and ten years later during the Taliban advance on the besieged capital, Kabul.

This new edition of An Unexpected Light is illustrated with the author’s photographs and celebrates a classic work of travel literature.

‘Jason Elliot is that rare traveller who surrenders himself to people and places and this tale is a many-layered reconstruction of his experience . . . I am sure this book will soon be among the classics of travel’ - Doris Lessing

‘An Unexpected Light is often unexpectedly funny and constantly perceptive, but it is also profound’ - New York Times

‘What raises the book to the level of a classic is its intensely personal meditation on the magic of unplanned adventure, of the pain and pleasure of pushing into the unknown. The whole book, like Elliot’s travels themselves, operated on this heightened level’ - The Times