In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.

The highest accolade I can give Prakash is to say he is a humanitarian. He has great empathy for all kinds of people he encountered in east Africa where he grew up, in the United Kingdom where he studied Industrial Chemistry, and in Canada where he makes his home today and works with Metro Testing and Engineering Services Limited as a Senior Materials Engineering Technologist. He is also an internationalist who seeks to understand the richness of the human spirit through great spiritual leaders past and present like Mahatma Gandhi of India, Dalai Lama of Tibet, the Reverend Desmond Tutu of South Africa, and Spiritual Chiefs of our Native North American Indians. He has given back to his community in Canada and is a respected member of his profession. - Virgil Dias (From the New River Free Press International) I have just finished your book while sitting by the pool. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. I like the way you presented the story and the honesty of the message. I can totally see you welcoming a stranger to your home as you did on several occasions to provide them with comforts at the expense of you and your family. In fact, the message you leave the reader with you is became richer for having the experience to assist one less fortunate than you. Well done my friend! Undoubtably you have taught your children and those close to you what it means to be a special person who demonstrates a real love for life. All the best, Rob Deverall

These are the true-life adventures of a woman who ranges over four continents, endeavoring to go beyond the limits of ordinary life. Recovering from an accident, she goes to Glastonbury, where she finds energy portrayed in ancient earthworks as a snake coiled in concentric circles around a hill. To walk this spiral is called threading the maze, which means both to ascend and to go deep within. This becomes a guiding emblem of her pilgrimages to sites of female spiritual and temporal power, from the Irish countryside to the Amazon jungle to the high mountain cultures of Nepal. Janine Pommy Vega, Beat Generation writer, performer, and musician, is the author of twelve books. For many years she has worked with Poets in the Schools, and she is a member of PEN's Prison Writing Committee.

DEMOCRACY UNDER STRESS focuses on the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and its implications for democracy. Why and how did the crisis come about? Are there any instructive lessons to be drawn from comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s? What are the democratic response mechanisms to cope with serious crises? Do they work? Is China a new trend setter? Do values matter? Are global democratic rules a possibility? These are some of the key questions addressed in the volume.

A vivid and well-researched novel about Grand Duke Michael who briefly reigned as the last Tsar of Russia. Fully illustrated to show the assets used and resumé of important political and armed forces leaders of time. No other books have taken a slice of Russian history and reinterpreted it to reveal a hidden story; one of survival against the odds and adventures that extend from Russia to the UK, Denmark and Estonia.. In The Two Lives of Grand Duke Michael, numerous historical high-ranking figures are set within an audacious plot in a ‘what if’ drama against the backdrop of the First World War and which could have changed 20th Century history. The allies plan to invade Russia, destroy the Bolshevik Revolution and bring back Russia to war with Germany on the eastern front. Lured by the idea of becoming the Tsar of the reinstated Imperial Rule, Michael is swayed by Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill to bring him out of Bolshevik Russia to the UK. The purpose is to agree terms and incorporate Michael’s ‘Prometheus Accord’ for political renewal and freedom in Russia. The ensuing two-week journey provides high adventure and gripping entertainment as he journeys in exotic cars, battleships, sea planes and secret German submarines, and with the additional intent of secreting a multi-million pound hoard of Romanov treasures on the Yorkshire coast in the UK. It comes to a halting stop when, as history tells us, the Grand Duke Michael’s attempts to defeat the emergence of Bolshevism is thwarted, and he is assassinated whilst under house arrest in Siberia. Here the story is set for the author’s imagined second chapter for Grand Duke Michael. He carefully crafts, in detail, the revelation of his survival. How he is helped by Sidney Reilly of MI6, and his second life in the UK under a new identity and care of the British Secret Service whilst working at Bletchley Park in World War Two.

William Trevor's Last Stories is forthcoming from Viking. In Reading Turgenev, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, an Irish country girl is trapped in a loveless marriage with an older man, but finds release through secret meetings with a man who shares her passion for Russian novels. My House in Umbra tells of Emily Delahunty, a writer of romantic novels, who helps survivors of a bomb attack on a train to convalesce, inventing colorful pasts for her patients. Two novels, two women who retreat further into the realm of the imagination until the boundaries between what is real and what is not become blurred.

Rachel Friedman has always been the consummate good girl who does well in school and plays it safe, so the college grad surprises no one more than herself when, on a whim (and in an effort to escape impending life decisions), she buys a ticket to Ireland, a place she has never visited. There she forms an unlikely bond with a free-spirited Australian girl, a born adventurer who spurs Rachel on to a yearlong odyssey that takes her to three continents, fills her life with newfound friends, and gives birth to a previously unrealized passion for adventure. As her journey takes her to Australia and South America, Rachel discovers and embraces her love of travel and unlocks more truths about herself than she ever realized she was seeking. Along the way, the erstwhile good girl finally learns to do something she’s never done before: simply live for the moment.