Mexico, through the eyes of Sybille Bedford is a country of passion and paradox: arid desert and shrieking jungle, harsh sun and deep shadow, violence and sentimentality. In her frank descriptions of the horrors of travel - through bug-infested jungle, trapped in a broiling stationary train, or in a bus with a dead fish slapping against her face - she gains our trust. But it is the charmed world of Don Otavio which steals our imagination. He is, she says, "one of the kindest men I ever met". She stays in his crumbling ancestral mansion, living a life of provincial ease and observing with glee the intense life of a Mexican neighbourhood.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2010 Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an ageing former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the troubled young woman he employs. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her longstanding compulsion to steal. We meet Bennie at the melancholy nadir of his adult life - divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in many places. With music pulsing on every page, this is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption. Breathtaking work from one of our boldest writers. 'Irresistible. Fiction of the highest quality' Sunday Times 'Egan's precise, calm underwater prose is a persistent pleasure' Daily Telegraph 'Stories that defy narrative convention' Financial Times 'A must-read' Sunday Times

A collection of poems describing the curious menagerie of guests and residents, human and animal, at William Blake's inn.

The Vaudois of Piedmont: A Visit to Their Valleys by J.N. Worsfold is a travelog about various small towns in Italy. Excerpt: Early on the morning of Easter Monday, 1871, in company with a devoted Italian pastor, I left my temporary home in the comfortable "Grand Hotel," in the little town of Pallanza, to gratify a long-felt desire of visiting that part of Europe made sacred by ages of heroic suffering and courageous endurance for faith and fatherland—the valleys of Piedmont."

In May 1863, FitzGerald Ross made his way across the military lines in northern Virginia and went directly to Richmond. Finding easy access to military and civil leaders of the Confederacy, he had an opportunity to accompany the Confederate Army in its invasion of Pennsylvania and into the Battle of Gettysburg. Afterward, he spent some time in Charleston and went by way of Augusta and Atlanta to the Chattanooga area about the time of the Battle of Chickamauga. Retracing his way to Charleston, he went to the rail to Savannah and on to Macon, Montgomery, and Mobile, returning on a steamer up the Alabama River to Montgomery and back over the same road to Charleston. In the early spring of 1864, he ran the blockade to Nassau and proceeded to Havana and New York. Captain Ross gave considerable attention to military affairs, but he also made many comments about the life of the people. He found a friendly attitude towards everybody and everything and, without making any predictions, evidently believed that the Confederacy could never be conquered. This account first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine.

A visit to the cities and camps of the Confederate States is [FitzGerald Ross's] own record of what he saw and learned of the South at war. As an honest (though over-sympathetic) picture of the Confederacy during the latter half of 1863 and the early months of 1864, it is one of the ... most informative of the relative few inclusive records left by outside observers of the Confederacy in its own time.