” The Village” by Nikita Lalwani, the prize-winning author of ” Gifted”, is a disturbing & utterly gripping modern morality tale set in contemporary India which will appeal to readers of Kiran Desai`s ” The Inheritance of Loss” & Jhumpa Lahiri`s ” The Namesake”. Ray, a young British-Asian woman arrives in the afternoon heat of a small village in India. She has come to live there for several months to make a documentary about the place. For this is no ordinary Indian village
- the women collecting water at the well, the men chopping wood in the early morning light have all been found guilty of murder. The village is an open prison. Ray is accompanied by two British colleagues &, as the days pass, they begin to get closer to the lives of the inhabitants of the village. & then it feels too close. As the British visitors become desperate for a story, the distinction between innocence & guilt, between good intentions & horrifying results becomes horribly blurred. Set in a village modelled on a real-life open prison in India, ” The Village” is a gripping story about manipulation & personal morality, about how truly frail our moral judgement can be. Nikita Lalwani has written a dazzling, heartfelt & disturbing novel which delivers on all the promise of her first. Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan & raised in Cardiff. Her first novel ” Gifted” was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize & shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award & won the Desmond Elliott Prize. She lives in London.
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This classic novel of colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), was first published in 1913 & is written by a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, husband of Virginia Woolf. It reads as if Thomas Hardy had been born among the heat, scent, sensuality & pungent mystery of the tropics. Translated into both Tamil & Sinhalese, it is one of the best-loved & best-known stories in Sri Lanka. It

Includes:: a new biographical afterword by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, author of ” Woolf in Ceylon”, & a short story, ” Pearls before Swine”, which vividly draws on Woolf`s experience as a young District Commissioner. This book reeks of first-hand knowledge of the colonial experience, & of its profound, malign disregard for the psychology & culture of its subject peoples.

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We have lived in villages a long time. The village was the first model for communal living. Towns came much later, then cities. Later still came suburbs, neighbourhoods, townships, communes, kibbutzes. But the village has endured. Across Engl&, modernity creeps up to the boundaries of many, breaking the connection the village has with the l&. With others, they can be as quiet as the graveyard as their housing is bought up by city `weekenders`, or commuters. The ideal chocolate box image many holidaying to our Sceptred Isle have in their minds eye may be true in some cases, but across the country the heartbeat of the real English village is still beating strongly
- if you can find it. To this mission our intrepid historian & travel writer Tom Fort willingly gets on his trusty bicycle & covers the length & breadth of England to discover the essence of village life. His journeys will travel over six thousand years of communal existence for the peoples that eventually became the English. Littered between the historical analysis, will be personal memories from Tom of the village life he remembers & enjoys today in rural Oxfordshire.
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Cultural commentator John Strausbaugh`s The Village is the first complete history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential & infamous New York City neighborhood. From the Dutch settlers & Washington Square patricians, to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire & Prohibition-era speakeasies; from Abstract Expressionism & beatniks, to Stonewall & AIDS, the connecting narratives of The Village tell the story of America itself. Illustrated with historic black-&-white photographs, The Village features lively, well-researched profiles of many of the people who made Greenwich Village famous, including Thomas Paine, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Twain, Margaret Sanger, Eugene O` Neill, Marcel Duchamp, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock, Anais Nin, Edward Albee, Charlie Parker, W. H. Auden, Woody Guthrie, James Baldwin, Maurice Sendak, E. E. Cummings, & Bob Dylan. ...

Don Whillans has an iconic significance for generations of climbers. His epoch-making first ascent of Annapurna`s South Face, achieved with Dougal Haston in 1970, remains one of the most impressive climbs ever made
- but behind this & all his other formidable achievements lies a tough, recalcitrant reality: the character of the man himself. Whillans carried within himself a sense of personal invincibility, forceful, direct & uncompromising. It gave him sporting superstar status
- the flawed heroism of a Best, a Mc Enroe, an Ali. In his own circle, his image was the working-class hero on the rock-face, laconic & bellicose, ready to go to war with the elements or with any human who crossed his path on a bad day.

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For generations, Argentine wine was famously bad
- oxidised, unpalatable & often mixed with a low-class French grape called Malbec.
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Smithy is a retired shearer turned vineyard worker in his autumn years. It is hard graft, but Smithy has always worked with his hands. Physically all but destroyed after a lifetime of hard liquor, but now sober, he begins to see the world with new eyes, a meditative, singular figure in the town's bar on rowdy Friday nights. But clarity can be a curse. Finally confronting his past, overwhelmed by long-buried feelings of regret, nostalgia & loss, Smithy steps in to help a young woman in a desperate situation. A cautious friendship develops, but Charlotte's husband is widely suspected of murder, & Smithy begins to fear that he will pay a high price for his gallantry. Written with an authentic music, & infused with beauty, brutality & sadness The Vintage & the Gleaning is a compelling observation of men, women & country. A remarkably accomplished debut novel. ...

It is one of the simplest acts in our life, but some people are committed to it, others do their best to avoid it. This collection tries to cover all situations we can find ourselves walking in, bringing together fiction & non-fiction, early & contemporary walkers, ramblers in the countryside & strollers in cities, walking for the soul & marching for freedom. It is a most pleasant & interesting read & as many of these anthologies do, through the filter of a very simple theme, shows us the infinite variety of human nature. ...

Hollywood lawyer Danny Roth is the victim of a world-class wine heist
- & he is devastated. Sam Levitt, former corporate lawyer,
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Hollywood lawyer Danny Roth is the proud
- & sometimes boastful
- owner of a fantastic collection of wines, the best vintages

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