The Cook. The Dervish. The Geographer. The Artist. The Jongleur. The Scholar. The Historian. A group of men are imprisoned by their Sultan and await death; they are to be executed for petty crimes. They all have one regret-not to have done the pilgrimage to Mecca. Whereupon, a talking parrot, centuries old, flies into their cell and rebukes them, suggesting they undertake the overland pilgrimage in their minds. So the prisoners imagine the journey, weaving art, history, cuisine, geography, literature, philosophy, Sufism, anecdotes and comic stories, to travel a fabulous road across the breathtaking and punishing landscapes of North Africa. All the while they are accompanied by the convivial parrot and its recollections of the past, whether in the company of the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in Tangier, as a mascot in the French Foreign Legion, mingling with the cross-dresser Isabelle Eberhardt, as companion to an English aristocrat in Algiers, enslaved by pirates off Tripoli, as sidekick to the circus strongman Giovanni Belzoni or muse to Gustave Flaubert in Cairo. It's a roller coaster of adventures that prove as colourful as its feathers.But who will reach Mecca, as one by one the prisoners are dragged out of the cell to meet the executioner?Winner of the K Blundell Trust Award.

The emotions lived through a special ceremony...a dreamy voyage to a high mountain village...the touching life story of a hardworking young couple...the ways of obtaining a driving licence...the joys and sorrows of a an Iranian woman coming back to her country after fifteen years of absence, rediscovering everything anew...a visit to an island in the light-green waters of the Persian Gulf... The Party and Other Short Stories is a delightful collection of tales that show the sunny side of daily life in the country of one thousand and one nights. This collection of short stories paints light-heartedly, and with humour life in the Iranian society of the 1990s and early 2000s. Episodes in the life of a mother bringing up her half-European son in the Iranian society, these stories not only reflect certain aspects of Florence Zohreh Zars personal and family life, but also her constant effort for more and more comprehension of the Iranian society.

What are the links between environment and world view? Topophilia, the affective bond between people and place, is the primary theme of this book that examines environmental perceptions and values at different levels: the species, the group, and the individual. Yi-Fu Tuan holds culture and environment and topophilia and environment as distinct in order to show how they mutually contribute to the formation of values. Topophilia examines the search for environment in the city, suburb, countryside, and wilderness from a dialectical perspective, distinguishes different types of environmental experience, and describes their character.