Seven years after they first came together, the members of the Black Hand Gang meet up again. They find much has changed. Whilst they cherish their shared past, they discover they have chosen different paths in life, and are preparing for adult life in different ways.

Billy is an uneducated quick witted lad from South East London. Roger is his middle class counterpart from a leafy suburb and training to be an architect. Their unlikely friendship and resultant partnership leads to a bank robbery, the proceeds of which is used as seed capital to form BHG a window cleaning business. Window cleaning is intended mainly as a front for further thieving. But Billy discovers that a successful business brings it's own rewards. Until a holiday to the Greek island of Zante puts some serious criminal temptation in their path. They kidnap the body of a Saint.

Fictions written between 1939 and 2005 by indigenous and white (post)colonial women writers emerging from an African–European cultural experience form the focus of this study. Their voyages into the European diasporic space in Africa are important for conveying how African women’s literature is situated in relation to colonialism. Notwithstanding the centrality of African literature in the new postcolonial literatures in English, the accomplishments of the indigenous writer Grace Ogot have been eclipsed by the critical attention given to her male counterparts, while Elspeth Huxley, Barbara Kimenye, and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who are of Western cultural provenance but adopt an African perspective, are not accommodated by the genre of ‘expatriate literature’. The present study of both indigenous and white (post)colonial women’s narratives that are common to both categories fills this gap. Focused on the representation of gender, identity, culture, and the ‘Other’, the texts selected are set in Kenya and Uganda, and a main concern is with the extent to which they are influenced by setting and intercultural influences. The ‘African’ woman’s creation of textuality is at once the expression of female individualities and a transgression of boundaries. The particular category of fiction for children as written by Kimenye and Macgoye reveals the configuration of a voice and identity for the female ‘Other’ and writer which enables a subversive renegotiation of identity in the face of patriarchal traditions.

The Black Hand Gang is a neighbourhood group of young Kenyans, which meets in the eastern part of Nairobi. The gang members, Onyango, Waithaka, his sister Jane, V.J. Patel and Hassan make a lot of friends trying to help other people. The story is intended as a supplementary text for children fluent in reading, to encourage reading for pleasure.

David Close’s English mother Isobelle Harwood never knew her mother, who died from TB just after childbirth and his Irish father Jack Close never knew his father, who was jailed for bigamy. To the Irish, ‘close’ means ‘near-enough’ while Jack always was, legally speaking, a bastard. These sociological factors shaped their working-class family struggles before, during and after World War Two in England and reappear as ‘family karma’ down the generations of this now-scattered clan. His mother’s childhood memories of orphanage life in the 1920s were followed by years of domestic servitude in the houses of her rich or unscrupulous ‘betters’ until she trained as a nurse during the war. She calls this story ‘Finding Myself’, which is part 1 of this book. Isobelle saw a photograph of and became pen-pals with an Irish nurses’ brother called Jack, a sailor on Atlantic convoy duties who she married on Victory in Europe Day in May 1945. David was born in June the following year. The second section ‘Knowing Myself’ reveals their married life until Isobelle’s battle with life-threatening TB when she was thirty years old in 1953. On recovery, her doctors claimed that if she lived in a dry climate and had no more children she would have a life-expectancy of ten more years. However, she produced two more offspring and managed to ride for an hour on a camel in China at the age of seventy-six. Part 3 contains David’s childhood memories of England, Ireland and in 1961 the first ten years of family life in Oz. Some of his father Jack’s wartime exploits and then his untimely death in 1982 lead the reader into the last section titled Release Retrospectives containing his mother’s mature reflections on grief, life and the all and everything, as well as her Back to Britain and Silk Road Diaries. Her son David’s lifelong troubled relationship with his father is explored in his other autobiographical works, but his two chapters titled ‘Close encounters of the personal secret kind’ and ‘Conflicts and growth amidst grief’ explore three of the Close family’s personal experiences of communications from beyond the grave – pointing towards reincarnation being cosmic reality central to any ‘Divine Plan’ and the healing answer to why we are here…

During the pandemic, the Blackhand Gang finds themselves confined within the walls of Lockdown Town. Without siblings, short on funds, and craving adventure, these four friends from diverse backgrounds share a unified spirit and a thirst for excitement. Their adventures are nothing short of extraordinary. From daring rescues to save a drowning individual, to facing the terror of processionary caterpillars, and confronting the heartbreaking captivity of a white lion, their courage and ingenuity know no bounds. In these challenging times, their friendship blossoms as they rely on each other for solutions to problems like family separations and welcoming a new gang member from Ukraine, who embraces their secret sign and the unexpected challenge of the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. The Blackhand Gang is defined by their unwavering commitment to each mission, guided by innovative plans that differ with each new adventure. This story is a testament to the power of friendship and resilience in the face of adversity, showcasing how unity and creativity can turn any situation into an extraordinary journey.