Eland Publishing Ltd – serie

Norman Lewis arrives in war-torn Naples as an intelligence officer in 1944. The starving population has devoured all the tropical fish in the aquarium, respectable women have been driven to prostitution and the black market is king. Lewis finds little to admire in his fellow soldiers, but gains sustenance from the extraordinary vivacity of the Italians. There is the lawyer who earns his living bringing a touch of Roman class to funerals, the gynaecologist who "specializes in the restoration of lost virginity" and the widowed housewife who times her British lover against the clock. "Were I given the chance to be born again," writes Lewis, "Italy would be the country of my choice."

A heart-rending account of a Spanish village torn apart by the coming of the Civil War - A rare humanist and female voice on a war which has otherwise been colonised by political commentary and male voices. A balance to the cruelty of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia - Woolsey, a poet, was married to Gerald Brenan, one of the Bloomsbury set who with the publication of South from Grenada became the English authority on Spain - New afterword by Michael Jacobs, author of The Factory of Light and the current authority on Andalucia - Perfect backlist tie-in to the current wave of highly popular Spanish travel writing

This classic novel of colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), was first published in 1913 and 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 and pungent mystery of the tropics. Translated into both Tamil and Sinhalese, it is one of the best-loved and best-known stories in Sri Lanka. It includes a new biographical afterword by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, author of "Woolf in Ceylon", and 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, and of its profound, malign disregard for the psychology and culture of its subject peoples.

This is what Eland is always looking out for - a scholar letting his hair down. Frustrated by the limitations of his professional career, Kaufmann chose to express his true understanding and deep affection for the Tuareg in fiction. A lifetime of detailed study, research and harrowing experience has gone into the creation of this seemingly effortless tale.

The Duke of Pirajno arrived in North Africa in 1924. For the next eighteen years his experiences as a doctor in Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland, provided him with opportunities and experiences rarely given to a European. He brings us stories of noble chieftains and celebrated courtesans, of Berber princes and Tuareg entertainers, of giant elephants, and a lioness who fell in love with the author.

The story of Koestler's imprisonment in France in 1940, his escape and his extraordinary and adventurous journey to the safety of London, which unfolds like some travel nightmare by Kafka. The 'scum of the earth' are those heroic individuals, like Koestler himself, who had fought the tide of fascism and come to live in liberal France under the mistaken impression that they would be safe.

An extraordinary collection of interviews with lighthouse keepers and their families, in their own words – a record of a vanished profession and avanished Britain of the 1970s. Described by William Golding as "one of the mostfascinating social documents I have ever read". It captures the delights and downfalls of isolation, the mindgames it plays on ordinary people and theromance of the outer reaches of Britain.

In "The Hill of Kronos", Peter Levi paints a radiant portrait of the Greece he came to know through a lifetime of exploration. As a young scholar he sought out its ancient spirit, the keys to its mythology and civilisation, in its ruined cities and majestic mountains. Later, as a priest working as a diplomat and a friend of the oppressed, he lived in Athens through the dark days of the dictatorship. Then the sinews of political life led back to secret alliances made during the civil war and the earlier occupation of Greece, back to murder, starvation and corpse-filled quarries. Lastly, it is seen through the mature eyes of a family man, with the ripened sensibility of an acclaimed poet. This is a precious fusion of experience, a gift of insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.

Following A Month by the Sea, her acclaimed exploration of life in Gaza, Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of living with and among Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in both Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks with whomever she meets, trying to understand them and their attitudes with her customary curiosity, her acute ear and mind, her empathy, her openness to the experience and her moral seriousness. Behind the book lies a desire to communicate the reality of life on the ground, and to puzzle out for herself what might be done to alleviate the suffering of all who wish to share this land and to make peace in the region a possibility. Meeting the wise, the foolish and the frankly deluded, she gradually knits together a picture of the patchwork that constitutes both sides of the divide - Hamas and Fatah, rural and urban, refugee, indigenous inhabitant, Russian, Black Hebrew and Kabbalist to name but a fraction.She finds compassion and empathy in both communities, but is also appalled by instances of its lack on both sides - a Palestinan woman who will not concede the suffering of Jewish civilian victims of a suicide bomber, and the Jewish inhabitants of Hebron who make the lives of their Muslim neighbours a living hell. Clinging to hope, Dervla comes to believe that despite its difficulties the only viable future lies in a single democratic state of Israel/Palestine, based on one person, one vote - a One-State Solution.

'Jonathan Raban is one of the world's greatest living travel writers.' William Dalrymple'The best book of travel ever written by an Englishman about the United States' Jan Morris, IndependentNavigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, Raban opens himself to experience the river in all her turbulent and unpredictable old glory. Going wherever the current takes him, he joins a coon-hunt in Savana, falls for a girl in St Louis, worships with black Baptists in Memphis, hangs out with the housewives of Pemiscot and the hog-king of Dubuque. Through tears of laughter, we are led into the heartland of America – with its hunger and hospitality, its inventive energy and its charming lethargy – and come to know something of its soul.The journey is as much the story of Raban as it is of the Mississippi. Navigating the dangerous, ever-changing waters in an unsuitably fragile aluminium skiff, he immerses himself with an irresistible emotional intensity as he tries to give shape to the river and the story – finding himself by turns vulnerable, curious, angry and, like all of us, sometimes foolishly in love.

'Of all his generation's travellers, Jonathan Raban is the most sophisticated, writing with a subtle and imaginative brilliance.' Colin Thubron'One of the most humane and visionary of all travel writers.' Jeremy SealInto Jonathan Raban's familiar Earls Court neighbourhood after the 1970s oil boom came new visitors from the Arab world, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks. A people apart, little known, Raban wanted to get behind the myth and the rumour to discover the reality of their lives and world. His journey took him through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. What he discovered was a far cry from the camel, tent and sand dune archetypes of early European explorers. Oil wealth had seeped into almost every corner, and Bedouin encampments had been replaced by cosmopolitan boomtowns, camels by Range Rovers. The sons of Bedouin nomads were now studying medicine in Europe and engineering in New York. Yet in this fast-moving world, old certainties remained – and cultural innovation lagged miles behind economic change.Raban's gift for friendship introduces us to a series of memorable individuals – rich and poor – set against the feel, the smells, the sounds and the nuances of Arabia.

We get to share in his personal discoveries through the humour and good fellowship of the road, full of entertaining misadventures. But there is never any doubt that there is an ultimate purpose to these journeys: a passionate need to bear witness to the truth about the past, after centuries of persecution by an alien ruling class. So through the dense clouds of historical tragedy, Wright exchavates hope that a revival of pride and dignity in Andean culture is possible.

"Walled Gardens" is a brilliant portrait of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, struggling through the post-war depression aided by drink, horse-racing and religion, and their own idiosyncratic adaptations to modern life. Seen from the troubled perspective of the daughter of an aristocratic family in decline, we watch the disintegration of a marriage in elegant but emotionally chilled surroundings, and the struggle to keep up appearances, and a collapsing roof, in front of the neighbours. By turns sad, absured and funny, the story is ultimately liberating as failure leads to freedom.

Through a dialogue between two lovers, a young physicist in England and an anthropologist in Germany, Nicholas Mosely retells the history of Europe of the twenties and thirties. The destructive power and attraction of fascism and communism is unveiled and set against the changing relationship between man and science in the time of atomic power. Their story weaves together disparate strands of landscape to take the reader on a journey through Spain, London, Soviet Russia, North Africa and middle Europe. Simultaneously taking us through a new intellectual landscape from the new scenes of physics, biology, anthropology and psychology. 'A novel of enormous ambition, a book that takes on just about every social movement, every significant political event of our time - a virtual intellectual anthology of the 20th century, in fictional form' - Daniel Stern, "New York Times" Book Review.

From his birth in 1916 (in the carding room of a cotton mill) until he ran away to London, William Woodruff lived in the heart of Blackburn’s weaving community. But after Lancashire’s supremacy in cotton textiles had ended with the crash of 1920, his father was thrown out of work. From then on, including the great depression of the 1930s, Woodruff and his family faced a life blighted by extreme poverty. Reading this book today, it is hard to comprehend that within living memory - and in what was the richest country in the world - so many people couldn’t even afford to buy enough food. For the ordinary families of Lancashire, unemployment was an ever-present fear: "If you worked you ate. If there was no work you went hungry."

A Russian Upstairs, Downstairs, but one scented with the cordite and fear of revolution, and with a cast of devotedly loyal and capable British governesses. Miss Emmie is an intimate and revealing portrait of pre-Revolutionary Russian society which, contrary to received wisdoms, reveals a complex, liberal and humane society, full of enormous potential and past achievement. It is also the biography of five intrepid women who, by travelling abroad and working as governesses in Russia, achieved an intellectual dignity, a purpose and an authority which was denied them in their homeland. The extraordinary personal adventures of these women, as they negotiate the turmoil and terrifying anarchy of Revolution and Civil War, turns the book into a page-turning thriller.

In 1966 Dervla Murphy travelled the length and breadth of Ethopia, first on a mule, Jock, whom she named after her publisher, and later on a recalcitrant donkey. The remarkable achievement was not surviving three armed robberies or the thousand-mile trail, but the gradual growth of affection for and understanding of another race.