With reverence and love, Britain's most admired rural writer chronicles daily life in a Stour valley village, finding beauty and significance in its sheer ordinariness as well as its many literary, artistic and historic associations.

With reverence and love, Britain’s most admired rural writer chronicles daily life in the Stour valley village, finding beauty and significance in its sheer ordinariness as well as in its many literary, artistic and historic associations. The year takes its shape from the seasons of nature and the feasts and festivals of the Christian year. Each informs and illuminates the other in this loving celebration of nature’s gifts and neighbourly friendship. Literature, poetry, spirituality and memory all merge to create an exquisite series of stories of our times. These delightful essays first appeared in the ‘Word From Wormingford’ column, a popular back page feature of the Church Times for some 20 years. It was praised as one of the finest journalistic columns by the Guardian in November 2012.

With characteristic lucidity and style, Steiner makes Heidegger's immensely difficult body of work accessible to the general reader. In a new introduction, Steiner addresses language and philosophy and the rise of Nazism. "It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger."—George Kateb, The New Republic

It is the early 1990s and Zhou Haonan, an innocent young man from a rural family in China's West Canton Province, travels to the `golden city' of Shenzhen to seek his fortune. Kind and caring but highly ambitious, he works as an international businessman, becomes a Sanda boxing champion and even sells his blood as he spends the next 20 years striving desperately to achieve his dream of a Shenzhen permanent residence permit and a home of his own. Despite a string of humiliating failures and disasters and cruel treatment by the women who enter his life, he somehow manages to get back on his feet and carry on through all the setbacks which life throws at him. The Road to Shenzhen is one of very few novels ever to be written in English by a Chinese author who has lived all his life in China.ÿ

In this psychologically complex and darkly humorous debut collection, awardwinning writer Henry Shukman introduces an unforgettable cast of characters, travelers whose certain paths around the world lead invariably back to the uncertain self. In “The Garden of God” an aging, ailing war reporter reflects on his adventures covering a little-known conflict in the Sahara and the precipitous and disgraced end of his career; In “Old Providence,” a dissolute artist mourns a lost love and the “bloody perfect island” where, through his own callow foolishness, he lost her. In “Darien Dogs” a man goes south to Panama, desperate for a business deal that will restore his finances and sense of mastery, only to find himself on a confounding search for a beautiful, mysterious woman and his stolen wallet. By turns full of suspense, farce and poignance, always alive with energy and atmosphere, these are the stories of a gifted and assured writer.