In a minute she'd beg me to do anything I could to save the garment. That's what they always did. Begged and pleaded. There was usually a lover involved, and a cheated-upon spouse. I, as the mender, would be saving their life. People had actually said I was worth my weight in gold . . . But it wasn't my skill the clients were grateful for. No. It was my collusion. What lies are worth: their weight in gold. You'd think that mending clothes would be an uneventful, uncomplicated occupation. No drama, no unnecessary explanations, no personal involvement. But people love to talk, and as they make their excuses to GoGo Sligo, of Megan Sligo Mending and Alterations, they reveal the holes in their stories as well. It doesn't take long for GoGo to get to the truth behind the rips and tears they've brought her to fix. As GoGo listens and sews, she realises she is also helping her clients cheat and lie to their husbands and wives. She's covering their tracks so they won't be found out. A five-week blackout brings the city to its knees, and a drama to her doorstep. A lover, a wife, and finally the cheating husband all come to claim a vintage Irish costume that GoGo's been mending. She doesn't want to like the guilty husband, but can't resist being drawn into the enticing web of his deceit, and then into his story of heartbreak and death on the streets of Belfast. To keep him coming back to the blacked-out house and to prolong the telling of his family's story, GoGo pretends the costume isn't finished. As she makes him return to her, day after day, it becomes clear that another kind of spell is being woven, and GoGo must face the truth about herself and her own life and marriage. An intoxicating, entrancing, gripping novel of illicit love, passion and embroidery, told in an inimitable voice by a brilliant writer.

This two-volume set presents information and images of the varied clothing and textiles of cultures around the world, allowing readers to better appreciate the richness and diversity of human culture and history. The contributors to Encyclopedia of National Dress: Traditional Clothing around the World examine clothing that is symbolic of the people who live in regions all over the world, providing a historical and geographic perspective that illustrates how people dress and explains the reasons behind the material, design, and style. The encyclopedia features a preface and introduction to its contents. Each entry in the encyclopedia includes a short historical and geographical background for the topic before discussing the clothing of people in that country or region of the world. This work will be of great interest to high school students researching fashion, fashion history, or history as well as to undergraduate students and general readers interested in anthropology, textiles, fashion, ethnology, history, or ethnic dress.

Through a literary lens, Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984-2008: Market Fictions examines the ways in which the reprise of market-based economics has impacted the forms of social exchange and cultural life in a settler-colonial context. Jennifer Lawn proposes that postcolonial literary studies needs to take more account of the way in which the new configuration of dominance—increasingly gathered under the umbrella term of neoliberalism—works in concert with, rather than against, assertions of cultural identity on the part of historically subordinated groups. The pre-eminence of new right economics over the past three decades has raised a conundrum for writers on the left: while neoliberalism has tended to undermine collective social action, it has also fostered expressions of identity in the form of “cultural capital” which minority communities can exploit for economic gain. Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984-2008 advocates for reading practices that balance the appeals of culture against the structuring forces of social class and the commodification of identity, while not losing sight of the specific aesthetic qualities of literary fiction. Jennifer Lawn demonstrates the value of this approach in a wide-ranging account of New Zealand literature. Movements towards decolonization in a bicultural society are read within the context of a marginal post-industrial economy that was, in many ways, a test case for radical free market reforms. Through a study of politically-engaged writing across a range of genres by both Māori and non-Māori authors, the New Zealand experience shows in high relief the twinned dynamics of a decline in the ideal of social egalitarianism and the corresponding rise of the idea of culture as a transformative force in economic and civic life, tending ultimately to blur the distinction between these spheres altogether. This work includes well-recognized authors such as Alan Duff, Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Eleanor Catton and Maurice Gee, but also introduces a number of non-canonical or emergent writers whose work is discussed in detail for the first time in this volume. The result is a distinctive literary history of a turbulent period of social and economic change.

Nepal comprises more or less 100 ethnic and caste groups, with the largest having more than three million in population. In this first volume of a series, 44 ethnic and caste groups will be represented and introduced to the readers through their diverse, colorful, symbolic, and notably designed costumes. Groups like the Bahragau, Chhetri, Khadiya, Lopa, Shathar, Teli, Walung, and many others are being displayed in this book. National Costumes of Nepal is not intended as detailed review of all ethnic and caste groups of Nepal, but this is more of a photo document and show national costumes as it is nowadays. Books in every home "If your first love was book, love it forever" www.persijsphotogallery.com

Tartan is an enormously popular pattern in modern fashion. Beginning as Highland dress, it was originally peculiar to certain areas of Scotland, but is now generally accepted as its national costume: what was once ordinary working clothing of a distinctive local style has been formalised into a ceremonial dress, with tartans once woven according to the fancy of those who wore them becoming fixed with certain patterns prescribed for different families, areas or institutions. This process was not, as is popularly thought, a phenomenon begun by the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott, but began long before as a reaction to the union with England in 1707. This book traces not only the early stages of that evolution, but the process by which the various tartans became icons of Scottish identity.

The clothes worn by our ancestors afford an invaluable insight into lifestyles that have disappeared. Choice of dress at any point in time is determined by a number of factors, such as social and economic pressures, moral codes, technical advances, influence of designers and artisitc movements, and the vagaries of individual taste.

"This book was conceived, designed and produced by Ivy Press ... East Sussex"--T.p. verso.

The final decade of the Cold War, through the eyes of a laconic and elegant observer In 1979 Richard Bassett set out on a series of adventures and encounters in central Europe which allowed him to savour the last embers of the cosmopolitan old Hapsburg lands and gave him a ringside seat at the fall of another ancien regime, that of communist rule. From Trieste to Prague and Vienna to Warsaw, fading aristocrats, charming gangsters, fractious diplomats and glamorous informants provided him with an unexpected counterpoint to the austerities of life along the Iron Curtain, first as a professional musician and then as a foreign correspondent. The book shows us familiar events and places from unusual vantage points: dilapidated mansions and boarding-houses, train carriages and cafes, where the game of espionage between east and west is often set. There are unexpected encounters with Shirley Temple, Fitzroy Maclean, Lech Walesa and the last Empress of Austria. Bassett finds himself at the funeral of King Nicola of Montenegro in Cetinje, plays bridge with the last man alive to have been decorated by the Austrian Emperor Franz-Josef and watches the KGB representative in Prague bestowing the last rites on the Soviet empire in Europe. Music and painting, architecture and landscape, food and wine, friendship and history run through the book. The author is lucky, observant and leans romantically towards the values of an older age. He brilliantly conjures the time, the people he meets, and Mitteleuropa in one of the pivotal decades of its history.

Queen Victoria's death in January 1901 shook Britain to its core, and reverberated not just throughout the Commonwealth, but around the world. She was a woman in her eighties, and yet it seems no one could contemplate the end of a reign that had lasted so long. Most could not remember a time when she was not Queen, and the very stability of everyday life seemed to depend on her regency. The anxiety of the government and the royal family about the prospect of the Queen's death was such that the news of her illness was deliberately concealed from the public for more than a week. When it came, people from England to Jamaica wept in the streets, and this grief was surpassed only by fear for the future. "God help us" was the standard reaction from all strata of society. The Last Days of Glory is the definitive account of those last 23 days in January 1901, when Victoria traveled to Osborne House to die. The momentous reaction to the Queen's passing attached to it more significance and a greater sense of change than the turn of the century had carried just a year earlier. Through the prism of those last days Tony Rennell presents us with a series of resonant and absorbing snapshots of a fading Empire at the end of the Victorian Age, and captures a nation coping with change, balancing comfortable nostalgia with the arrival of a new order.