"Here is a tale or tribal vendetta on the steppes of central Asia - the seemingly interminable cycle of atrocity and revenge - between the Turkmen and Adai Kazakhs of yesteryear." "It is a tale, ritually told, of all-but-ritual barbarity: how the 'warrior Zhoneyut' of the Turkmen is driven, despite deeper, gender instincts, to avenge the dreadful retribution wreaked by the Kazakh hero Dyuimkara on his beloved brother Kekbor, and the fateful consequence of his musician son Daulet's attempt at counter-retribution. Yet there is an under-running moral of this prose 'ballad' by the modern master of an ancient Kazakh genre serving to cleanse today's reader with a message for our own times. That message is one of 'eliminating' (in the author's words) 'from our lives the cruelty, evil and mistrust which afflict us, and of giving inspiration to the hardest of hearts, as did the legendary heroes of Kazakhstan'."--BOOK JACKET.

Maggie Smith-Bendell and her family are Romani Gypsies and, as she grew up, Maggie learned the old crafts and customs of the Gypsies' traditional way of life. In this memoir, Maggie describes a way of life that has more or less vanished in the 21st century.

The Lost Words by composer James Burton takes its inspiration and text from the award-winning 'cultural phenomenon' and book of the same name by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris: a book that was, in turn, a creative response to the removal of everyday nature words like acorn, newt and otter from a new edition of a widely used children's dictionary. Both the book and Burton's 32-minute work, which is written in 12 short movements for upper-voice choir in up to 3 voice parts (with either orchestral or piano accompaniment), celebrates each lost word with a beautiful poem or 'spell', magically brought to life in Burton's music. At its heart, the work delivers a powerful message about the need to close the gap between childhood and the natural world. Burton's piece was co-commissioned by the Hallé Concerts Society for the Hallé Children's Choir and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The piano accompaniment version was premiered at the Tanglewood Festival in 2019 by the Boston Symphony Children's Choir, of which Burton is founder and director. The Hallé Children's Choir will premiere the orchestral version of the full work in Manchester, UK, post-pandemic. Vocal Score Co-commission by Boston Symphony and Hallé Concerts Society for their respective Children's Choirs. Two versions - with orchestral or with piano accompaniment. The vocal score is the same for both versions. James Burton is a composer but also a conductor. He is conductor of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and choral director of the Boston Symphony. The book The Lost Words, exquisitely designed, has won multiple awards and is an international best-seller. The vocal score includes Jackie Morris's beautiful imagery in its cover design.

In Half Forgotten Song, fourteen-year-old Mitzy Hatcher’s lonely life on the wild Dorset coast is changed forever when renowned artist Charles Aubrey arrives to summer there with his exotic mistress and daughters. Mitzy develops a bond with the Aubrey household, gradually becoming Charles's muse. Over the next three summers, a powerful love is kindled in her that grows from childish infatuation to something far more complex… Years later, a young man in an art gallery looks at a hastily drawn portrait and wonders at its intensity. The questions he asks lead him to a Dorset village and to the truth about those fevered summers in the 1930s. With Sunday Times bestselling novel Half Forgotten Song, Katherine Webb spins a historical tale of long kept secrets and obsessive love that fans of Kate Morton and Susanna Kearsley are sure to love.

Although Olga Orozco has won almost every major literary award from her native Argentina and her work has been translated into 15 languages, no single volume of her poetry exists in English--until now. Award-winning translator/Colorado Poet Laureate Mary Crow has chosen the finest of Orozco's poems for this long-awaited Spanish-English bilingual collection, Engravings Torn from Insomnia. Olga Orozco is the author of 20 books of poetry. Her work makes use of surrealist techniques as well as the vatic voice of primitive poetry. She died in 1999. Mary Crow has published several award-winning translations. She teaches at Colorado State University and is the Poet Laureate of Colorado. Crow is the author of Borders and I Have Tasted the Apple.

From Academy Award-winning film director Neil Jordan comes an artful reimagining of an extraordinary friendship spanning the revolutionary tumult of the eighteenth century. South Carolina, 1781: the American Revolution. An enslaved man escaping to his freedom saves the life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a British army officer and the younger son of one of Ireland's grandest families. The tale that unfolds is narrated by Tony Small, the formerly enslaved man who becomes Fitzgerald's companion—and best friend. While details of Lord Edward's life are well documented, little is known of Tony Small, who is at the heart of this moving novel. In this gripping narrative, his character considers the ironies of empire, captivity, and freedom, mapping Lord Edward's journey from being a loyal subject of the British Empire to becoming a leader of the disastrous Irish rebellion of 1798. This powerful new work of fiction brings Neil Jordan's inimitable storytelling ability to the revolutions that shaped the eighteenth century—in America, France, and, finally, in Ireland.

This autobiography in stories, When Eve Was Naked, takes us through a most remarkable life, from the innocence of prewar Prague through the horrors of the Nazi occupation and World War II. In the title story, narrated by Skvorecky's alter-ego Danny Smiricky, seven-year-old Danny falls in love for the first time; at sixteen he hides in a railway station and watches as his Jewish teacher is herded onto a train and taken away; and in 1968, as Russian tanks rolled into Prague, Skvorecky flees Czechoslovakia, taking Danny with him. In the collection's final stories, Danny begins his tenure as Professor Smiricky at a Canadian university and attempts to come to terms with the politically innocent and self-centered youth that flock to his courses.