In this second novel of the Baines Saga trilogy, Baines and Judi Peake are now cruise ship musicians. As a scintillating, dazzling love affair develops, they encounter numerous eccentric and often bizarre passengers and events: a woman carrying a Koala bear, the "own goal" footballer who self-destructs in interview, a divorce announced during a wedding vow renewal ceremony, the Neapolitan Eternals, and countless others. On the luxury Fabergé Express Trans-Australia train, chartered by the cruise line, they learn of a catastrophic engine-room fire aboard the liner. Appointed as Roving Ambassadors by Graf von Lemke for his global hotel chain, they are now Signora and Signor Cantatore. But this rapidly leads to complications, leaving both with a highly uncertain future.

In retracing explorer Mungo Park's fatal journey down West Africa's Niger River, author and adventuress Salak became the first person to travel alone from Mali's Old Segou to Timbuktu, the legendary "doorway to the end of the world." This is her story.

When in March 2020 the Covid pandemic led the Government to impose a total lockdown Gabriel Josipovici decided that he would respond to a unique situation by writing an essay a day for a hundred days, prefacing each with a diary entry, keeping track of the changing seasons as well as the pandemic. As organising and generating principle for the essays he chose the alphabet, and the result is a stimulating kaleidoscope of topics from Aachen to Zoos, passing by Alexandria, Luciano Berio, Ivy Compton-Burnett, reflections on his own early works The Echo-Chamber and Flow, Langland's Piers Plowman, the idea of repetition in life and art, and much else. Josipovici reminds us that he has previously 'plundered episodes in my life to illustrate the intertwining of memory and forgetting, the desire to remember and the need to forget', and here he has someone say to him: 'You don't seem to be afraid of revealing a great deal about yourself.' 'I don't think I feel it that way,' he responds. 'I can "reveal" precisely because it does not seem to be part of me. It seems to belong to someone else, a writer I have lived with, an immigrant I have known.' Loquacious, funny and incautious, this surprising book is in effect a kind of expressionist self-portrait as well as a meditation on a hundred days of the pandemic.

Detailed history of the last of the commercial sailing ships surviving in American waters through the thirties.