The Karen – one of the many insurgent groups in Burma (Myanmar) – have been waging an increasingly desperate fight for freedom for the past half century. Jonathan Falla, a British nurse, spent an illegal year helping to train village health workers, while writing this remarkable portrait of an ancient culture remade for the purposes of ethnic rebellion. There are chapters on food, music, love and marriage, the Karen military hierarchy and its weaponry, on mercenaries and missionaries, on y...

"Forty-eight occasional pieces ranging from the music of forest rebels to Arabic novels by way of Kenyan trains and the automatic pistols in my mother's attic."Jonathan Falla's life and work has taken him from origins in the Caribbean to disaster relief agencies and children's rights, by way of university scholarships and nursing. His writing career includes award-winning stage and film drama, widely acclaimed novels and short stories, and these inquisitive, witty essays taken from...

The killing of a mammoth obstructing the tourist routes in the Scottish Highlands, and the death of a Red Brigade terrorist in an attic overlooking the Venetian lagoon. Desperate negotiations with an architect in Iran, and the beating of an aid worker for failing to deliver rain - these are some of the startling scenarios of Jonathan Falla's second collection of stories."Falla's harsh, precise and constantly sensual portrayal of a cruel world is partly offset by his evocative descr...

"Your parents know that somebody is spying on them? Why doesn't your father rip down the microphone?""He's proud of it.""Proud? It's an outrageous intrusion!""Father says: better spied on than not worth spying on."Jonathan Falla's sixth novel is a startling and creepy tale of exiles living in ruined factories in a city determined to ignore their presence. Until, that is, a well-meaning but naive doctor gets involved, and the political situation becomes both ...

Jonathan Falla, author of the acclaimed Blue Poppies, follows up with a devastating story set among the harsh deserts of Western Sudan. Ten years in the writing, the book is disturbingly prescient of recent events.Set in Darfur, this is the dramatic and frightening story of improbable love between two people working for a European aid agency caught up in an African crisis. Mogga and Leila, a black and an Arab, have been badly wounded by their past. But, as the country teet...

"Glenfarron" is the tale of a rugged Scottish Highland landscape, and of the impact of three generations of incomers: Polish aircrew at a military hospital in the 1940s, a young Glaswegian couple who inherit a remote property in the 1970s, and African diplomats visiting Scotland in an attempt to recover stolen artefacts in 2006. These three stories overlap in a web of hauntings, illicit love, and a farcical battle to protect cultural heritage.This is fine prose, filled with highly e...

A beautifully written and absorbing story of exile and redemption set against the stark Patagonian wilderness at the start of the modern age.Matthieu Macanan has fled his home in France, to work as a doctor in a remote region of South America where his past is unknown. There he tends to the locacl tribes and tries to avoid contact with European settlers. When Silke Kahn and her husband Theo fly into his world with plans to run an airmail service in the area, his reclusive life is i...

A quietly devastating tale of innocence caught up in civil war, Jonathan Falla's The Morena was shortlisted for the National SHort Story Prize. Other tales here have been widely published and broadcast of BBC Radio, and won a PEN fiction prize."Glacial and understated, Falla's prose has an almost mythical quality. Beautifully evocative and utterly engrossing." Textualities.com

The sweeping long-lost novella, now available in paperback for the first time in 40 years, alongside recently rediscovered short story 'The Lost One', from the original queen of romantic suspense'Total heaven' Harriet EvansLanzarote. A wealthy young woman elopes with an impoverished fisherman, leaving her family distraught.Perdita West, secretary to a famou...

As a young girl, Josie Dew developed an overpowering urge to travel. She also fell out of a fast-moving vehicle and, rather inconveniently, developed a lifelong aversion to cars. Along came her first bicycle, and she has never looked back. Four continents, thirty-six countries and eighty thousand miles worth of astounding adventures, eccentric characters, varied cultures and ever-enduring optimism are the result of her travels.From Saharan locust invasions to tree-climbing goats, an...

The second collection of travel writing (and other essays) by Britain's funniest and most feared critic.A.A. Gill is probably the most read columnist in Britain. Every weekend he entertains readers of the Sunday Times with his biting observations on television and his unsparing, deeply knowledgeable restaurant reviews. Even those who want to hate him agree: A. A. Gill is hopelessly, painfully funny. He is one of a tiny band of must-read journalists and it is always...

In Contact! Jan turns her brilliantly observant eye to the human contacts she made, across the globe and though the decades. As a series of vignettes, some only a few lines long, she records hundreds of brief glimpses and fleeting encounters, celebrating the people who helped spark her view of the world and mould her responses. A vast range of human experience is here: most are anonymous, everyday encounters - children playing, a homeless man in Manhattan, a lascivious taxi-driver...