Anna was working at the hotel bar when she spotted an attractive, but lonely-looking, patron. She asked him if he wanted someone to talk to and ultimately accepted when he invited her to his suite. Even though her evening with Dan was a one-night thing, she didn’t regret it. After all, she was blessed with a beautiful angel that night… Five years later, Anna is the assistant manager of the hotel and Dan has suddenly appeared in front of her again?this time as an investor.

In the wealthy, polygamous household of Jeremiah Dike, first-wife Helen feels she has not been accorded the status she deserves, because unlike Jeremiah’s younger wives, she has not born him a son. But Helen is a woman who is used to getting exactly what she wants, and so she hits on a plan...to take a wife for herself and to declare that wife’s son as her own. That’s when pregnant, sixteen-year-old Rebecca joins the Dike household, escaping the scandal of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, by becoming Helen’s wife. But when the expected son turns out to be a girl, Helen’s plan requires some major rethinking. This state of affairs results in an enormously complicated family dynamic, in which white-hot conflicts arise, unexpected bonds are forged, and vast reservoirs of love are tapped. Peopled with the colourful, diverse, and frequently oppositional members of an extended Igbo family in the years leading up to and including the Nigerian Civil War, My Mother’s Wife paints an indelible picture of a unique and fascinating culture, which will come to face a genocide that threatens to destroy it.

Challenging the stereotypical images of the dominating male and the subservient woman, Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas addresses the variety of representations of gender in Latin American culture. Ranging across homosexuality, prostitution, football, politics and ethnic relations, this fascinating study analyzes the many potent images of gender, from Maradona, the child trickster of Argentinian football, to La Malinche, mistress of a conquistador and traitor to her nation. Based on social anthropological fieldwork, the essays in Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas present rich ethnographic material drawn from a variety of locations in Latin America, from Mexico City to the highlands of Ecuador. Paying particular attention to the cultural and symbolic meanings of gender research in the region, together the essays reveal the central role of gender differences in the making of ethnic, national, political and economic divisions.

Taking the cue from the currency of risk in popular and interdisciplinary academic discourse, this book explores the development of the English novel in relation to the emergence and institutionalization of risk, from its origins in probability theory in the late seventeenth century to the global ‘risk society’ in the twenty-first century. Focussing on 29 novels from Defoe to McEwan, this book argues for the contemporaneity of the rise of risk and the novel and suggests that there is much to gain from reading the risk society from a diachronic, literary-cultural perspective. Tracing changes and continuities, the fictional case studies reveal the human preoccupation with safety and control of the future. They show the struggle with uncertainties and the construction of individual or collective ‘logics’ of risk, which oscillate between rational calculation and emotion, helplessness and denial, and an enabling or destructive sense of adventure and danger. Advancing the study of risk in fiction beyond the confinement to dystopian disaster narratives, this book shows how topical notions, such as chance and probability, uncertainty and responsibility, fears of decline and transgression, all cluster around risk.