Camillo Ricchiardi can’t help treating foreign wars like swashbuckling adventures. If Winston Churchill wasn’t in chains, the young reporter may have penned a scathing article about his captor’s reckless sojourn with the Boers: underdog farmer-warriors fighting for their independence on African soil. Camillo, an Italian military maverick, seems unfettered in his ego-driven journey to become a household name—wreaking havoc behind enemy lines in what’s fast becoming Britain’s most embarrassing conflict of the nineteenth century. But Camillo’s luck can’t last forever. Britain is rewriting the rules of traditional warfare, and the Boers are becoming desperate to maintain their advantage. When tasked to assemble an elite legion of Italians skilled in bridge bombing and guerrilla tactics, Camillo puts his best hand forward. He only serves his bulletin-perusing audience—those seeking the weekly wish fulfilment they won’t forget in three lifetimes. Camillo must quell mutinies, bounty hunts and romantic desires in his thrilling quest to discover his physical and mental limits—at his persistent and ever-nearing peril.

‘Brave, poetic, brutal, always honest. By leading the reader through his chaotic childhood and immersing us in a mental health treatment centre, Lesedi forces us to confront conversations that are often hard to have. I was moved and challenged.’ – GAVIN WEALE So here I am, at a psychiatric hospital, looking for myself in a building I’ve never been to before. A few nights ago, I was ready to rid myself of myself. I still am, only, in a different way ... Patient 12A is Lesedi Molefi’s absorbing memoir, reflecting on his time spent in a psychiatric clinic in 2016. With vulnerability and candour, Lesedi reflects on the moments, large and small, that led him there. It is at once a personal history, an observation of how childhood experiences can have a profound effect on the adults we become, and a commentary on how mental illness remains a difficult conversation in black families. More than anything, in Patient 12A, Lesedi allows himself to filter out the noise in his head to find the truth, however uncomfortable that may be.

This volume presents case studies of literacy practices as shaped by culture, language, community, and power. Covering a range of contexts and exploring a number of relevant dimensions in the evolving picture of literacy as situated, multiple, and social, the studies are grouped around four overarching themes: *Language, Literacy, and Hegemony; *The Immigrant Experience: Language, Literacies, and Identities; *Literacies In-/Out-of-School and On the Borders; and *New Pedagogies for New Literacies. It is now generally recognized that literacy is multiple and woven within the sociocultural lives of communities, but what is not yet fully understood is how it is multiple--how this multiplicity plays out across and within differing sociocultural contexts. Such understanding is critical for crafting school literacy practices in response to the different literacy sets brought to school by different learners. Toward this end it is necessary to know what those sets are composed of. Each of the case studies contributes to building this knowledge in new and interesting ways. As a whole the book provides a rich and complex portrait of literacy-in-use. Cultural Practices of Literacy: Case Studies of Language, Literacy, Social Practice, and Power advances sociocultural research and theory pertaining to literacy development as it occurs across school and community boundaries and cultural contexts and in and out of school. It is intended for researchers, students, professionals across the field of literacy studies and schooling, including specialists in family literacy, community literacy, adult literacy, critical language studies, multiliteracies, youth literacy, international education, English as a second language, language and social policy, and global literacy.