Travels through Pakistani territory once occupied by the Taliban

 

Mint condition. Amazon sells this book for over $120. PB. 226pp. Our special price $60 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The Northern Areas of Pakistan are truly magnificent in their beauty ranging from majestic mountains that kiss the sky, enchanting valleys, and fascinating terrain with forests, rivers, and glaciers. These remote areas exhibit a tranquil sense of magic with the absence of commercialization and an ethnic culture relatively unchanged by modernity. This volume presents an account as well as a guide to travelling in the Northern Areas for the inexperienced as well as the seasoned traveller. The author writes about trekking, accommodation, food, landscape and the overall travelling conditions.

This is an excellent guide to the traveller on a budget of 20-30 dollars a day and is useful as a backpacker tool. The book is both a travelogue, detailing a series of journeys, as well as a guide and is essential for anyone interested in this untarnished region. Historical and social information is provided along with a key that designates precise distances and security conditions. Thirty-three photographs showing the splendour of the Karakorams and the Western Himalayas are included.

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.

Pakistan - playing with fire?

 

HB. Mint condition. 352pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

 A volatile nation at the heart of major cultural, political, and religious conflicts in the world today, Pakistan commands our attention. Yet more than six decades after the country’s founding as a Muslim democracy, it continues to struggle over its basic identity, alliances, and direction. In Playing with Fire, acclaimed journalist Pamela Constable peels back layers of contradiction and confusion to reveal the true face of modern Pakistan.

In this richly reported and movingly written chronicle, Constable takes us on a panoramic tour of contemporary Pakistan, exploring the fears and frustrations, dreams and beliefs, that animate the lives of ordinary citizens in this nuclear-armed nation of 170 million. From the opulent, insular salons of the elite to the brick quarries where soot-covered workers sell their kidneys to get out of debt, this is a haunting portrait of a society riven by inequality and corruption, and increasingly divided by competing versions of Islam.

Beneath the façade of democracy in Pakistan, Constable reveals the formidable hold of its business, bureaucratic, and military elites—including the country’s powerful spy agency, the ISI. This is a society where the majority of the population feels powerless, and radical Islamist groups stoke popular resentment to recruit shock troops for global jihad. Writing with an uncommon ear for the nuances of this conflicted culture, Constable explores the extent to which faith permeates every level of Pakistani society—and the ambivalence many Muslims feel about the role it should play in the life of the nation.

Both an empathic and alarming look inside one of the world’s most violent and vexing countries, Playing with Fire is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand modern Pakistan and its momentous role on today’s global stage.

SOLD Hanif Kureishi writes about his father

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 256pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Following the discovery of an unfinished manuscript written by his father, Kureishi looks back on his own development as a writer in the light of his father s unrealised literary ambitions

A remarkable insight into the birth of a writer, and the moving discovery of family secrets.

When Hanif Kureishi discovers an abandoned manuscript of his father's his understanding of the family history is transformed. So begins a journey which takes Kureishi through his father's privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, to the trauma of partition and to his adult life hidden away in the suburbs of Bromley - his days spent as a minor functionary in the Pakistan embassy in London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition. This is a book about his father's failed career as a writer and the beginnings of Kureishi's successful career as one - as his father looks on with pride and perhaps envy.

Travels across Pakistan's wild frontier

 

Excellent condition. PB. 334pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Australian Benjamin Gilmour travelled to Pakistan determined to shoot a film on its wild frontier.

He had never made a movie before and it was illegal and extremely dangerous for him to do so in the region.

But Ben was driven by his passion for the Pashtun people of the North West Frontier Province and for the remarkable gun-making town of Darra Adam Khel.

This book is the behind-the-scenes account of the highly-acclaimed film, Son of a Lion.

But it is more than just a 'making-of'. Ben tells the story of a country with an amazing and rich culture, and of the proud and loyal people who befriended him.

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.

A memoir of hilarity

 

Mint condition. PB. 282pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.