Communism & its fall had a worldwide impact, but none felt the changes more than the previously Soviet states. In 2007 & 2008, photographer Nick Hannes travelled across the 15 former Soviet republics & took pictures of the different consequences of the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991. This publication

Includes:: intense photography of a developing region full of contrasts: extreme wealth amidst poverty; & golden statues of new dictators in cities of concrete. It shows how much change has already occured & how much is still to come, with experienced photographer Nick Hannes` poignant images.

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Cambodia! not a subject normally expected to cause congestion around the travel shelves. Why then a third edition? Perhaps because it is different. Two elderly, some would say naive, doctors from middle England throw caution to the winds & head off with VSO, an organisation more usually associated with adventurous youngsters. They face not just humid heat, cockroaches & cultural somersaults but something incomparably more challenging, the harsh realities of a country still reeling from the prolonged terrors of Pol Pot`s Khmer Rouge. With generosity of spirit & an unquenchable sense of humour they plunge into a maelstrom of lawlessness where life is cheap & guns & greed prevail. Surrounded on all sides by medical, financial & ethical dilemmas, the author gradually gropes her way towards the climax of her work, the launch of a clinic for prostitutes actually inside the brothel where they work. She tells the stories of these young girls, many of them under sentence of death from AIDS, stories that shock, horrifies & form the pivotal point of the whole story. It is a thoughtful book, written with great artistry & turn of phrase. It is written with an eye & an ear to the history, new & old, of an extraordinary & little-known country. This third edition contains a postscript considering events since 2003 bringing the reader up-to-date with the situation in Cambodia as it is today. ...

` The East isn`t far away at all. It clings to me, it goes with me everywhere. It`s like a big family that you can`t shake off
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Winner of the European Book Prize ” The East isn`t far away at all. It clings to me, it goes with me everywhere. It`s like a big family that you can`t shake off.. .” ” Tender, acute & utterly absorbing” Anna Funder, author of Stasiland ”A wry & unheroic witness...an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists” Julian Barnes Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf & Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets & insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn`t play; certain things you didn`t say. Now, married with two children & the Wall a distant memory, Maxim decides to find the answers to the questions he couldn`t ask. Why did his parents, once passionately in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, & his mother quit her career in journalism? & why did his grandfather Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he unearths is, like his country`s past, one of hopes, lies, cruelties, betrayals but also love. In Red Love he captures, with warmth & unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the GDR would be a new world & why, in the end, it fell apart. ” Tender, acute & utterly absorbing. In fine portraits of his family members Leo takes us through three generations of his family, showing how they adopt, reject & survive the fierce, uplifting & ultimately catastrophic ideologies of 20th-century Europe. We are taken on an intimate journey from the exhilaration & extreme courage of the French Resistance to the uncomfortable moral accommodations of passive resistance in the GDR. ” He describes these `ordinary lies` & contradictions, & the way human beings have to negotiate their way through them, with great clarity, humour & truthfulness, for which the jury of the European Book Prize is delighted to honour Red Love. His personal memoir serves as an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists... He is a wry & unheroic witness to the distorting impact
- sometimes frightening, sometimes merely absurd
- that ideology has upon the daily life of the individual: citizens only allowed to dance in couples, journalists unable to mention car tyres or washing machines for reasons of state.” Julian Barnes, European Book Prize With wonderful insight Leo shows how the human need to believe & to belong to a cause greater than ourselves can inspire a person to acts of heroism, but can then ossify into loyalty to a cause that long ago betrayed its people.” Anna Funder, author of Stasiland ” Heartbreaking... This very personal account allows us to better understand the reality of a kafkaesque regime, & the blindness of its elite that allowed it to survive for so long.” La Tribune ” The great charm of this book, about the gradual disintegration of the GDR, lies in the level-headed but loving attitude with which it investigates the interweaving of the private & political [in Communist East Germany], revisiting a child`s-eye view of the era.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ”A crucial book.. .poignant.. .a tragedy reminiscent of the great narrative poets, Dostoevsky or Koestler. Maxim Leo has earned his place alongside them.” Sud Ouest ”A lyrical story about a family in a divided city” Hamburger Abendblatt Maxim Leo was born in 1970 in East Berlin. He studied Political Science at the Free University in Berlin & at the Institut d` Etudes Politiques de Paris. Since 1997 he is Editor of the Berliner Zeitung. In 2002 he was nominated for the Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prize, & in the same year won the German-French Journalism Prize. He won the Theodor Wolff Prize in 2006. He lives in Berlin.

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Political corruption, capitalist greed & past injustices are all revealed when Inspector Chen investigates a serial killer in Shanghai. An early morning jogger found her. Clad in nothing but a red mandarin dress, she had been dumped, barely concealed, on a traffic isl&. The death of a dancing girl was unpleasant but this was particularly unusual in that she had been left openly in the centre of town. She had probably angered one of the Mr Big Bucks that were taking over & transforming Shanghai. Inspector Chen is an intuitive investigator, a talented poet & an honourable man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Desperate to find a way to release himself from the perilous police career that had been chosen for him, he takes time off to begin an MA in Literature. Then another girl is found dead. With a serial killer on the loose. Chen is pulled back to work & into his most dangerous assignment yet. ...

This is what Eland is always looking out for
- a scholar letting his hair down. Frustrated by the limitations of his professional
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On 4 October 1957, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union secretly launched Sputnik, Earth`s first artificial moon. Powered by a car battery, it passed over the stunned American continent once every 101 minutes & propelled the USSR from backward state to superpower & pioneer of the Space Age. This is the pulse-racing story of a time when two nations & ideologies were pitted against each other in a quest that laid the foundations of the modern technological world. ...

So much begins on the banks of the Nile: all religion, all life, all stories, the script we write in, the language we speak, the gods, the legends & the names of stars. This mighty river that flows through a quarter of all Africa has been history's greatest & most sustained creator. In this dazzling, idiosyncratic journey from ancient times to the Arab Spring, Robert Twigger weaves a Nile narrative like no other. Along the way we meet crocodiles & caliphs, nineteenth-century adventurers & twentieth-century novelists, biblical prophets & classical lovers, dam-builders & crusaders. As he navigates a meandering course through the history of the world's greatest river, he plucks the most intriguing, colourful & dramatic stories
- truly a Nile red in tooth & claw. The result is both an epic journey through the whole sweep of human (and pre-human) history, & an intimate biography of the curious life of this great river, overflowing with stories of excess, love, passion, splendour & violence.
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So much begins on the banks of the Nile: all religion, all life, all stories, the script we write in, the language we speak, the gods, the legends & the names of stars. This mighty river that flows through a quarter of all Africa has been history`s most sustained creator. In this dazzling, idiosyncratic journey from ancient times to the Arab Spring, award-winning author Robert Twigger weaves a Nile narrative like no other. As he navigates a meandering course through the history of the world`s greatest river, he plucks the most intriguing, colourful & dramatic stories
- truly a Nile red in tooth & claw. The result is both an epic journey through the whole sweep of human & pre-human history, & an intimate biography of the curious life of this great river, overflowing with stories of excess, love, passion, splendour & violence.
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November 2009. An emaciated young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, is led to a freezing isolation cell in a Moscow prison, handcuffed to a bed rail, & beaten to death by eight police officers. His crime? To testify against the Russian Interior Ministry officials who were involved in a conspiracy to steal $230 million of taxes paid to the state by one of the world`s most successful hedge funds. Magnitsky`s brutal killing has remained uninvestigated & unpunished to this day. His farcical posthumous show-trial brought Putin`s regime to a new low in the eyes of the international community. Red Notice is a searing expose of the wholesale whitewash by Russian authorities of Magnitsky`s imprisonment & murder, slicing deep into the shadowy heart of the Kremlin to uncover its sordid truths. Bill Browder
- the hedge fund manager who employed Magnitsky
- takes us on his explosive journey from the heady world of finance in New York & London in the 1990s, through his battles with ruthless oligarchs in the turbulent landscape of post-Soviet Union Moscow, to his expulsion from Russia on Putin`s orders. Browder`s graphic portrait of the Russian government as a criminal enterprise wielding all the power of a sovereign state illuminates his personal transformation from financier to human rights activist, campaigning for justice for his late lawyer & friend. With fraud, bribery, corruption & torture exposed at every turn, Red Notice is a shocking but true political roller-coaster that plays out in the highest echelons of Western power.

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