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New from EnvelopeBooks - an important study in social anthropologyA ROAD TO EXTINCTION is a plea for the survival of a group of palaeolithic tribespeople who, against the odds, have retained their extraordinary culture in the forests of the Andaman Islands, 400 miles off the coast of Burma in the Indian Ocean.The Andamans were taken over by the British in the late 1850s for the establishment of a penal settlement following the Indian Mutiny, and the author's family was involved for several years in the islands' administration. They now belong to India.For centuries, the islanders, whose origins can be traced back to Africa 100,000 years ago, have resisted all efforts to accommodate them into modern civilization. They are now at risk of extinction and there is no meaningful plan to protect their interests, other than by doing exactly what they do not want and engaging them in development programmes and giving them handouts.Irrespective of the mistakes the British made in the past, India has had exclusive responsibility for these tribespeople for nearly 70 years and during this time its involvement has been a complete and destructive failure. India needs to recognise the urgency of the situation and intercede, at last, to give the people the security but also the privacy that they require, encouraged if necessary by other sovereign states.

Men of Talent Sought! Only Superior Persons Need Apply!  A brilliant comic novel from EnvelopeBooks. Political satire—half Daoist wisdom, half Lewis Carroll. A modern-day Chinese schoolteacher falls into an alcoholic sleep and dreams himself back a thousand years, scaling the heights of the imperial civil service—and then finding himself stranded.All roads leads to the celestial city, and when schoolmaster Po Cheng drinks too much and falls into a dream, he finds himself on just such a road. Assisted by teaching colleague Miss Ling, Po Cheng reaches the imperial capital, rising through the giddy ranks of the Chinese civil service to become prime minister.Good fortune appears endless, not least when delectable Miss Ling reappears in his life as an artist's model who has changed her name to Precious Pearl so she can pose in the Forest of Brushes Academy of Art without her parents finding out.But what Heaven—and alcohol—give, they can also claw back. With trouble brewing inside and outside the city walls, Po Cheng's career and life seem fated, and he must now take the inevitable consequences of his rise to fame and power.Mustard Seed Itinerary is a hilarious first novel, bringing to the formal conventions of traditional Chinese literature the wry humour of a Carrollian satirist.

WRY TALES FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSIn France, Mattie feels twenty again. In Poland, Magda revisits her impoverished family. In Uzbekistan, Diana lets a fellow tourist kiss her. In Germany, Lynn loses her luggage on the Dusseldorf train.The Hopeful Traveller is a collection of short stories about-and told by-single women who have put the past behind them but are still looking for their anchor in the present. The stories include bitter-sweet accounts of the freedoms of postwar life, foreign travel, the rekindling of old friendships and the search for new ones. They speak of cosmopolitan, self-confident, well-heeled characters, in an era just before the birth of feminism, conventional in their expectations of men, always just a step away from displacement and alienation.Set variously in Paris, Kalisz, Samarkand, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Erfurt, Singapore and London, these stories, from a much-admired veteran writer, offer a teasing mix of realism and fantasy, wish-fulfilment and regret. Some of these stories have appeared in translation in overseas annuals and collections.

FIRST-HAND POLITICAL REPORTING FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSMichael Holman's eye-witness reports on Eastern and Southern Africa for the Financial Times and other media provide rare insights into the region's post-independence successes and setbacks.From his accounts of atrocities by Rhodesian forces in the 1960s to his interviews with those who aspired to lead Africa into its own future and assessments of how they actually performed, Holman brings together a lifetime of commentary on a continent he grew up in, knows acutely and loves dearly.Written with the benefit of exceptional access, Holman's writings still hold out hope for Africa, in spite of decades of disappointment at the structural mismanagement of the nations themselves, the flawed policies of donor countries and funders, and the hateful legacy of imperialism.Essential reading for anyone wanting an introduction to the first half-century of Africa's post-colonial history.

Unable to cope with the death of his girlfriend, Londoner Michael Roberts tries to find comfort in memories of another time and another place when he was in love for the first time.But that first time was as a schoolboy in Belfast, at the start of The Troubles in the late 1960s, and in a culture dominated by divides that weren’t just sectarian.To his surprise and increasing anguish his memories—long buried—prove elusive, so that finding out what had really happened and why it got suppressed becomes more and more of an obsession.As Michael gradually uncovers forgotten truths he starts to learn something that challenges everything he ever knew about himself and the person he has become.Frances Creighton: Found and Lost is a deeply felt first novel that conveys the pain of late adolescence in a community where school and religion add more layers of cruelty to the underlying instability of daily life and Northern Irish politics.

For those of advanced tastes, the Modern Movement was a welcome corrective to the debased aesthetics of the commercial world. The products of light industry were as untutored in the 1920s and 30s as massed housing and both took scant interest in the idealist thinking that sought to harness architecture and design to social progress.Robert Best, one of Britain's leading industrialists in this period, shared the goal of better mass education but was troubled by Modernism's promoters, for reasons that they found hard to understand. If the few knew better than the many, and had an obligation to elevate them whether they liked it or not, where did this leave the democratic principles that our liberal society prided itself on? Best felt that the campaign to popularise Functionalist design took propaganda into territory that had uncomfortable political overtones.In this extraordinary memoir, written in the early 1950s but never previously published, Best explored his concern about the sense of noblesse oblige that lay behind such bodies as the Council of Industrial Design, set up in 1944 ostensibly to raise the saleability and quality of British manufacturing but also, in his view, to brainwash the public into denying what it liked in favour of more cultivated but untested alternatives.

Welcome to The Gay Street Chronicles!When Mrs Gaia Champion hosts her first supper after the untimely death of her adored husband Hercules, the meal goes sadly awry.Enter gay hero Bellerophon “Belle” Nash: city councillor, grandson of Bath’s original Master of Ceremonies Beau Nash, and bachelor extraordinaire.Assisted by a group of eccentric lady friends, Belle sets out to explore Gaia’s culinary mishap, only to expose a web of corruption that goes to the heart of Regency Bath’s judicial system.In doing so, he struggles to retain the commitment of his German “cousin”, and Princess Victoria—not yet Queen—persuades Gaia that all women can defeat the bonds of male repression.

NEW FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSA very tough read, by an impassioned and angry campaignerHuntington’s disease leads to physical and mental deterioration. There is no cure. It is handed down genetically, with a 1 in 2 chance of inheritance that cannot be determined until the disease shows itself, often not until the sufferer is in their 40s.Many do not know they carry the gene or are at risk of passing it on. Those who do know, because a parent has suffered from it, may wait a lifetime before finding out whether they are safe or not.The prospects are horrific. After his first marriage failed, Brian Verity had a breakdown and married the woman who had nursed him back to health. Within a few years, she started showing the signs of Huntington’s that he had noticed in other members of her family and of which he already had a morbid fear.Having fallen in love with her in hospital, he now found himself repelled by what was happening to her, fearful of his own psychological fragility and inability to cope, and yet committed to protecting her from the distress that lay in wait.What should he have done? What should society do?Why My Wife Had to Die is a blunt indictment of the inability of political, legal, religious and health professionals to face up to what the author regarded as incontrovertible truths.

NEW FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSAn anguished memoir of one man's political struggle and physical resilience.The Romanian artist George Tomaziu must have anticipated being imprisoned for monitoring German troop movements through Romania during the Second World War.He may also have imagined that if the Allies won, and if he somehow survived the brutalisation of captivity and torture, his personal fight against Fascism would be acknowledged by his liberated compatriots.It wasn't. Under the Communist government that came to power in late 1947, he was sent back to prison and stranded there, for 13 years, in the most inhuman conditions.Against the odds, he survived. This is his story, translated from the French by Jane Reid, whose husband at the British Embassy in Bucharest managed to persuade the Romanians to allow Tomaziu, his wife and child to leave the country. Tomaziu settled in Paris, where he wrote this account but could not find a publisher for it. He died in 1990.

Ahmad Shawkat was an Iraqi Kurd who edited his own radical magazine—Bilattijah— after the fall of Saddam Hussein and who wrote enthusiastically about Iraq’s future as a state free from tyranny, secular and religious, having been imprisoned and tortured four times by the regime.When Michael Goldfarb went to Iraq the cover the Second Gulf War for the US’s National Public Radio in 2003, Shawkat became his translator, guide and close friend. They planned to stay in touch after Saddam was toppled and Goldfarb returned home.Their plans did not work out. Shortly after the USA declared victory, Shawkat was shot to death outside his office in Mosul by members of one of the Islamic terror groups he had railed about. His killers have never been caught but Goldfarb swore to memorialise Shawkat’s life in a book, first published in 2005, now republished under a new title. It is a tragic story of an Iraqi idealist and potential role model.

Should bakers’ daughter want to marry princes? (Lucinda’s father didn’t think so.)Should kings and queens let princesses play with dragons?Should Orpheus have made so much of a fuss about his wife?Should Ben rely on Magic Eye creatures to help him find his mother in Brazil?Should Father Christmas retire and let us give presents to him for a change?So many questions—but these are the burning questions of the day, if you live in storyland.  With children’s writers inventing new formats every day, Janina David has gone back to traditional forms—Grimms’ fairy tales and ancient legend—and matched classic themes and modern sensibilities to produce stories that feel as if they’ve always been around, just waiting for us to discover them. The Princess and the Baker's Daughter: Five Stories for Five Children is a collection of captivating tales intended for readers of different ages and different interests, but all linked by a common love of make-believe. Some have appeared in translation in overseas annuals and collections. One has been staged, to great success.

NEW FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSHow can Indian girls get the same opportunities as Indian boys?The Kassims are a traditional Indian Muslim family, living in Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s and 60s, where they enjoy a wealth of new opportunities but are held down by white racism and are torn apart by their own changing values.Kulsum wants her daughters to have an education that will expand their horizons; Razaak fears that education will make the girls unmarriageable within the Khumbar caste. Feeling sidelined by Kulsum's modernity and her other achievements, Razaak defers to his father and sends their daughters to a less sophisticated branch of the family over 1000 miles away in rural Uganda. How should Kulsum respond?In this affectionate picture of a little-documented African cultural milieu, first-time author Fatima Kara digs into her own memories of life as a Gujarati in Bulawayo, conjuring up the brilliant colours, mouth-watering foods and exotic plant life of a region she remains devoted to and wants us to love as she does.

Will Baami ever stop beating up his wife and become a commissioner? Will Ezinne ever go on a date with Chibuzor, Segun's answer to Cristiano Ronaldo? Will Oladayo always be bullied by Benjamin, the corrupt politician's son? Will Musa's friends Maryam and Kabiru survive Boko Haram's attack on their village?The life of the underprivileged is always desperate and provisional, whether in urban Lagos or in the countryside in northern Nigeria. In this energetic collection of twelve short stories, Tunde Ososanya exposes the challenges of daily life and the efforts of ordinary people to aspire in the face of overwhelming odds.There are distractions. Humour is one, observed in the audacity of conmen who ride the yellow danfo buses. Magic is another, in the spirit world that Mr Benson asks his Literature-in-English students to write about. But the most immediate is always sex, the ultimate escape.Twelve stories about invisible heroes, each fighting the tragedy of modern Nigeria in their own way.

An hilarious caper through Regency Bath - wherein justice and bigotry collide with a bumpFollowing on from Belle Nash and the Bath Soufflé, this second adventure in The Gay Street Chronicles sees our hero return to Bath overcome by love and confusion, only to learn how great is the suffering of others.At the end of his last adventure, Belle was banished for four years to the island of Grenada. It is now 1835, and he is back in the city he grew up in and adores, but misses the love he left behind in the Caribbean.His heartache leads to personal mishaps when he meets Pablo Fanque, the Black equestrian acrobat from Norfolk who longs to set up his own circus. As a well-loved figure in Bath, Belle uses his influence to try and help, but has to run the gauntlet of Lord Servitude, the most hated man in England and a die-hard supporter of slavery.As ever, William Keeling's whimsical tale brings Belle, his gay hero, into a situation where comedy does not obscure stark moral issues of prejudice and bigotry that are as alive today as they were in Regency times.

Chris Hilton went to Havana in the early 2000s to escape the drudgery of life in England―and found himself mixed up with a variety of gangland chancers, all living on the edge of legality.There was always the risk of their moneymaking schemes getting rumbled by the police but that’s what made it so compelling. And then there was Jamilia―a refugee from rural poverty, who’d come to the big city as a teenager, and been rescued from the streets by a terrifying family of small-time criminals.“A little crazy is good,” Jamilia tells Chris― and a little crazy they become, living hard, loving hard and downing a deal of Cuban rum.But how long can craziness last? And what happens when you need to escape from escapism?

Princess Raine is a bright kid―a very bright kid. And that’s her problem. No one likes smart kids, especially when they’re unaware of the effect they have on other people. Even her Dad (that’s the king) finds her too much. To make things worse, she has two funny, silly, younger brothers―twins―both as dumb as a bar of soap―whom everyone loves. It’s not fair.So when the kingdom of Rainland is threatened by a massive and abnormal heatwave, the reason has to be a natural phenomenon, like global warming―right? It couldn’t be the arrival of some magical, mythical, firebreathing monster. Could it?The king wants Raine to go and investigate but she refuses; let him send his younger son, if he’s so sure there’s a monster: it’s always the youngest who slays the dragon in fairytales. And then something totally unexpected happens to her and everything changes. But how?

In neutral Ireland in 1940, where wartime combatants live side by side, an Englishman and a German each need the other to betray his country. And if the nationalist firebrands get their way, they may have to fight to the death.But hang on! Just a few months ago, Flight Lieutenant Oliver Carmichael and Baron Julius von Stulpnagel were living together in Berlin, trying to sell forged paintings. So what are they doing in rundown Ballingore, and how will ex-convent-girl Mary Collins and her devoted red-headed sidekick Niamh Slattery play into their hands?A hilarious Irish farce, with all the slapstick flavour of an Ealing Studios comedy.

NEW FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSDavid Tereshchuk leapt from a bleak childhood in a small town on the English-Scottish borders to a precocious high-flying career as a TV reporter, first in London, then in New York. During his years as a journalist, he managed to elicit revealing statements from tyrants and the oppressed, but there was one person he never persuaded to open up to him—his mother.He wanted to know just one thing: who his father was. It wasn't until he was in his 50s that she confided to having been raped, aged 15, by a priest – and even then, not all her information was reliable.Alongside his career, the search for his mother’s abuser has haunted him, adding further layers of stress to a life already marked by alcoholism and insecurity.This is his astonishing story, one that deserves to sit alongside those of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and David Brinkley.

ANOTHER BRILLIANT NOVEL FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSProfessor Arthur Lash, born Artur Lasch in pre-war Austria, takes his American wife and their three sons back to Vienna, in 1960, to see how well his father is rebuilding his life after regaining the factory stolen from him when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938.For Arthur, the journey helps him re-establish his links with the city he was brought up in; for the rest of his family, the new horizons of travel awaken a range of other emotions, all watched over by their wise but needy and uninvited travelling companion, Mrs Woodbine, the family nanny..In this, his stunning third novel, Michael Ladner draws on his own background as a child of the generation of exiled European academics who found a new home in America.A perfect book club read.

How do we understand the heritage of the Levant? In the last few hundred years, the centre of cultural innovation has moved inexorably westwards, leaving us with too small a grasp of the turmoil out of which our own civilisation grew. In 2003 Rupert de Borchgrave set off on a journey of ideas that took him to the much-disputed grounds where the ancient world constructed the philosophical, religious, mathematical and artistic thinking that continues to shape our lives today. This book is the product of that journey and the musing that it gave rise to.

AN IMPORTANT NEW NOVEL FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSIn late 1994, The New York Times sends a group of American journalists and Rwandan guides to a small village in Northern Rwanda to cover the atrocities that have killed nearly a million during the spring and summer. Some know each other already; others become acquainted as the assignment proceeds.They all need to get along, but the more they’re together, the more their expectations of each other change, not least during a trek that takes them across the border to the gorilla forests of Uganda and the volcanoes of Zaire.Maggie Bawden: “Deft plotting that offsets culturally different definitions of violence and sexual conflict.”

After humiliating a fellow inquisitor at a trumped-up witch trial in Northern Italy, Brother Jacobus of Vienna has his intellectual curiosity piqued by rumours of strange events in Northern England. In defiance of the cardinals in Avignon, Jacobus travels to Berwick where he finds a land in disarray, beset by Scottish raiders, eccentric Franciscan friars and talk of demons in the woods. Can he solve the mysteries that abound and keep his faith and reason intact?

A SOCIOLOGICAL WORK FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSWembley Speaks is a new type of grassroots sociology. Based entirely on postings on Nextdoor, the local networking app, the book reveals how a community talks to itself and what matters to it.As well as housing England’s national stadium, Wembley – the community under observation – is unusual in its demographics. Over 70% of the population has an ethnic minority background, compared to 18% for England as a whole. To what extent do tensions arise?Wembley Speaks provides a heartwarmingly reassuring answer. It shows how people engage with each other, how they challenge and support each other, what triggers their concerns and shapes their attitudes, how they use language, what they find funny and how they work together for the common good. Uplifting.

Musicians have always been inspired by the places in which they live. Benjamin Britten will always be identified with the Suffolk coastland; Edward Elgar with the rolling hills of Worcestershire.After composer Luke Ottevanger found that his ability to write music had deserted him, he sent himself on a series of therapeutic musical journeys, to explore how the landscapes of Britain had liberated musicians in the past.In this thoughtful account of his self-imposed quest, he investigates the myths and legends behind the music of nearly thirty composers, and interlaces descriptions of the genesis and history of almost seventy musical pieces with his own accounts of the places he discovered on his travels-and what he learned about himself.

Award-winning news photographer Roger Allen had often taken animal photos, but never grasped how badly humans can mistreat other sentient beings.Everything changed for him when he met Mely, an orangutan that had been shackled all its adult life to the verandah of a riverside house in remote Borneo. She was drained of life but had enough grace to reach out one hand to him. He reached back, they touched, and in an instant he was converted into an impassioned animal-rights campaigner.In this stunning book of colour photographs, Roger documents the dramatic rescues he has brought to the world’s attention – of tigers, lions, rhinos, dogs and bears – as well as, in many cases, their happy outcomes.

Margaret McLaren-Reid was a society debutante and good-time girl in the 1920s, who enjoyed partying, dancing, flirting and the devotion of two husbands. Richard Cullen wades through over 700 letters to reconstruct her experience of life in the British Empire during the interwar years and subsequently as a wife on the diplomatic circuit.

COMEDY FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSAward-winning TV producer David Britton is enraged with the world, but much of the world is enraged with him too. Especially when he screws up the deal to sell the media company that’s driving him crazy. But that’s not the half of it. He has offended most of his staff, and his wife wants a divorce, and he’s getting hate mail, and he’s being harassed by religious freaks. And Sylvia Plath has died. In his kitchen. After he’d dropped her. It’s not looking good.

On her deathbed, Charles Dickens’s wife asked her daughter to give his letters to the British Museum “so the world may know he loved me once”.That the world might doubt it is not a surprise. In his later years Dickens built a wall in their bedroom to keep her out, forced her to visit his teenage mistress to silence gossip, and even tried to have her confined to an asylum. He went on to ban her from their home and children, and publicly destroyed her reputation to protect his own.For nearly two centuries this version of their marriage—crafted by Dickens himself—has gone unchallenged. Yet his letters reveal another truth: Catherine was once his “ever-dearest Kate”, the object of a love “which no alteration of time or circumstance can ever abate”.In her revelatory new book, Annie Elliot lets Kate speak at last. Set in the twenty-four hours after Dickens’s death in 1870, Mr & Mrs Charles Dickens follows her as she revisits their life together, reliving its joys and betrayals, and reclaiming her voice.Based on extensive research, it fulfils Kate’s last wish—restoring her to history as more than Dickens’s wronged wife, and revealing the woman behind the myth.

BIBLICAL POLEMIC FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSThe Book of Esther (the Megillah) is the last book in the Bible and one of only two biblical works that makes no mention of God (The Song of Songs is the other). Why is that? Why would the editors of the Bible include a story about the survival of the Jewish people in the face of almost certain destruction and not publicly attribute it to divine providence?In this new and revelatory analysis, the designer and critic Stephen Games looks closely at the curiosities of the book as a piece of literature—at its changes of style and tone, at its inconsistencies and redundancies, and at the discrepancies in its writing—and identifies two different authors with two agendas and not a lot of common ground.One is terse and businesslike, the other garrulous and detailed. Games calls the first of these M and the second of them E, and speculates that they can be equated with the two principal characters, Mordecai and Esther, even if Mordecai and Esther cannot be shown to be the actual authors.In a dynamic introductory essay, he argues that from the very start of the book we see two separate stories diverge. Then, as the heroes of the story fight to save the Jewish people from the prospect of genocide, their literary avatars become locked in a battle to tell their own tale, claim that they and not the other played the more decisive role in orchestrating Jewish survival, and either reinforce or challenge gendered structures of power.Apart from being an account of an existential threat to the Jews living under Xerxes’s rule, the Book of Esther is shown to be a playing out of a literary struggle exactly contemporary with Aeschylus’s earliest surviving play nearly 2,500 years ago (alsoi about Persians) and fifty years before Aristophanes’s political comedy (Lysistrata) about another woman’s efforts to end a war.Games offers a radical new reading of the Megillah and a startlingly original way of representing the text’s literary conflicts in visual form. The book includes his notes and also the Septuagint (Old Greek) text for comparison, with its six extra sections, rejected by the Jewish establishment 2,000 years ago.