' The first thing Senora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha...' Their distant, nostalgic memories of home, their sense of anonymity in a foreign l&, the terrifying pang of vulnerability they feel as they step over the threshold into an alien world... These pilgrims
- the ageing prostitute preparing for death by teaching her dog to weep at her grave, the panicked husband scared for the life of his injured wife, the old man who allows his mind to wander on a long-haul flight from Paris
- experience with all Marquez's humour, warmth & colour, what it is to be a Latin American adrift in Europe or, indeed, any outsider living far from home.

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Strange Places, Questionable People is the first volume of John Simpson`s autobiography. For over thirty years, John Simpson has travelled the world to report on the most significant events of our time. From being punched in the stomach by Harold Wilson on one of his first days as a reporter, to escaping summary execution in Beirut, flying into Teheran with the returning Ayatollah Khomeini, & narrowly avoiding entrapment by a beautiful Czech secret agent, Simpson has had an astonishingly eventful career. In 1989 he witnessed the Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall & the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe &, only weeks later, in South Africa, the release of Nelson Mandela. With Simpson`s uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time, this autobiography is a ring-side seat at every major event in recent global history. ...

A missing woman. A missing boy. Detective Erlendur returns
- for the last time. A young woman walks into the frozen fjords of Icel&,
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The La Fleur restaurant has a slew of unusual phenomena. Bonnet-clad apparitions pass through walls, blood leaks from ceilings & rats besiege the dining room. Experts from the Great Essex Witch Museum are called in to quell these strange sights. But before Rosie Strange & Sam Stone can do their thing events turn darker. For La Fleur`s chef has been strung up & slaughtered like a pig. More oddly, the only witness, the owner`s daughter Mary, swears blind a ghost did it. Rosie & Sam must find out what`s happening before Mary takes the fall. But intuitions & tip-offs lead them stumbling into the dark waters of the past, exposing secrets of a wider conspiracy, as well as secrets all Rosie`s own. With strange chills Rosie & Sam learn that seeing isn`t always believing, while thoughts of truth may be just as illusory. ...

Long considered a masterpiece of the eerie & fantastic, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a collection of supernatural-themed tales compiled from ancient Chinese folk stories by Songling Pu in the eighteenth century. These tales of ghosts, magic, vampirism, & other things bizarre & fantastic are an excellent Chinese companion to Lafcadio Hearn`s well-known collections of Japanese ghost stories Kwaidan & In Ghostly Japan. Already a true classic of Chinese literature & of supernatural tales in general, this new edition of the Herbert A. Giles translation converts the work to Pinyin for the first time &

Includes:: a new foreword by Victoria Cass that properly introduces the book to both readers of Chinese literature & of hair-raising tales best read with the lights turned low on a quiet night. Some of the stories found in these pages include: The Tiger of Zhaocheng The Magic Sword Miss Lianziang, the Fox-Girl The Quarrelsome Brothers The Princess Lily A Rip Van Winkle The Resuscitated Corpse Taoist Miracles A Chinese Solomon.

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When Daniel Kalder, acclaimed author of Lost Cosmonaut, descended into the sewers of Moscow in pursuit of the mythical lost city of tramps, he didn`t realise that he was embarking on a bizarre, year-long odyssey that would lead him thousands of miles across Russia to the Arctic Circle via the heart of Asia. After exploring the depths of Moscow`s ` Underground Planet`, Kalder chases down demons & exorcists in a post-Orange Revolution Ukraine, meets Vissaron Christ, one-time traffic cop, now messiah to thousands of followers in Siberia, enters the only wooden skyscraper on the planet & encounters a man with a bizarre secret that may explain everything... ...

Tsukiko is in her late 30s & living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, ` Sensei`, in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired &, she presumes, a widower. After this initial encounter, the pair continue to meet occasionally to share food & drink sake, & as the seasons pass
- from spring cherry blossom to autumnal mushrooms
- Tsukiko & Sensei come to develop a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly & poignantly into love. Perfectly constructed, funny, & moving, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a tale of modern Japan & old-fashioned romance.

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Astor, Ontario. 1904.A boy staggers out of the forest covered in blood & collapses at the feet of 16-year-old Emmy. While others are suspicious & afraid, Emmy is drawn to him. Is he really the monster the townsfolk say he is? Astor, Ontario. 1994. Megan arrives from London for her great grandmother Emmy`s 105th birthday. It should be a happy family occasion, but Megan is nursing a broken heart & carrying a secret she fears might consume her. One family. Two women. A century of secrets. A timeless love story. ...

Gershom Scholem, the great humanist thinker & founder of modern Kabbalah, is all but forgotten today. But here, in a biography as daring & inquisitive as its subject, George Prochnik goes in search of Scholem, restoring the reputation of a vital intellectual & finding in his work a vision with the power to reinvigorate contemporary religious & political thought. Tracing Scholem`s life from his upbringing in Berlin, where he experienced a close & transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, Prochnik reveals how Scholem`s frustration with the bourgeois ideology of Germany during WWI led him to discover mystic Judaism, Kabbalah, &, finally, Zionism. But having emigrated to what was to become Israel, Scholem again found himself a `stranger in a strange land`, ill at ease with a prevailing conservative form of Zionism. Prochnik follows Scholem to the modern Holy Land
- only to find that he too is disillusioned by the state politics he encounters. But through his profound study of Scholem & his own experience of Jerusalem, Prochnik not only questions the ideological & religious constructs of Jerusalem, but finds an ethical way forward, showing how a new form of pluralism might energize Jewish thought.
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