Beyond The Bougainvillea

Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014 Winner of the Alfaguara Prize 2011 Winner of the Gregor von Rezzori Prize 2013 No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde in a seedy billiard hall in Bogot� than Antonio Yammara realises that the ex-pilot has a secret. Antonio's fascination with his new friend's life grows until the day Ricardo receives a mysterious, unmarked cassette. Shortly afterwards, he is shot dead on a street corner. Yammara's investigation into what happened leads back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped Colombia in a living nightmare.

It is a place both mythic and all too real, a place thought to be the site of one of our oldest human settlements and known to be a center of ancient cultures and annihilating conflicts. It sits at the bottom of a malarial valley, the lowest place on the surfact of the earth--"the overheated, earthen basement of the world," as Robert Ruby describes it. And yet, long before the world's modern religions began scrapping over its bones, Jericho was home to waves of colonization and floods of destruction. Fought over by the succeeding epochs of ancestors, the place we call Jericho is as old as the first remnants dated at 9,000 B.C.--and as current as the daily headlines. In this unorthodox biography of the first eleven thousand years in the life of a legend, Robert Ruby takes us back through time to those early settlements, then forward to the often crude but ultimately successful latter-day attempts to locate Jericho, to unearth and map and catalog its history. Beginning with the geography of place, he weaves together his own intimate knowledge of modern-day Jericho with stories of the lives and work of those explorers and archaeologists of the past whose courage often bordered on madness and whose dedication sometimes seemed the purest kind of human folly. Soldiers, scholars, engineers, adventurers--dilettantes and professionals alike, they were all dreamers drawn to this parched and dusty spot where so much of human history took place. Matching biblical accounts to araeological evidence, sifting myth from science, phantoms from reality, Robert Ruby teases out the complex strata of the past, helping us to make sense of what exists today. With the flair of a novelist and the enthusiasm of an amateur archaeologist, he offers a tale that is part detection, part epic adventure. Above all, he gives us a work of great literary panache: witty, fact-filled, and uterly, subversively compelling.

This book examines collecting around the world and how women have participated in and formed collections globally. The edited volume builds on recent research and offers a wider lens through which to examine and challenge women’s collecting histories. Spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first (although not organized chronologically) the research herein extends beyond European geographies and across time periods; it brings to light new research on how artificiallia and naturallia were collected, transported, exchanged, and/or displayed beyond Europe. Women, Collecting and Cultures Beyond Europe considers collections as points of contact that forged transcultural connections and knowledge exchange. Some authors focus mainly on collectors and what was collected, while others consider taxonomies, travel, patterns of consumption, migration, markets, and the after life of things. In its broad and interdisciplinary approach, this book amplifies women’s voices, and aims to position their collecting practices toward new transcultural directions, including women’s relation to distinct cultures, customs, and beliefs as well as exposing the challenges women faced when carving a place for themselves within global networks. This study will be of interest to scholars working in collections and collecting, conservation, museum studies, art history, women’s studies, material and visual cultures, Indigenous studies, textile histories, global studies, history of science, social and cultural histories.

The Dalai Lama regarded their flushed, animated faces, his forehead wrinkling. "The materialist approach," he nodded. "Seeking to change what you believe to be entirely outside you. It has many problems. For example, why must you constantly postpone your happiness?" India's Top Ten Social Influencers Under 30 were taken aback by this question. Staring at him, their eyes filled with consternation. Postponing happiness was something they most definitely wanted no part of. "For example, if our happiness depends on having the new diamante sunglasses," he chuckled. "Or the perfect boyfriend," he beamed from the girl dressed in crimson to the one in emerald green. "Or having ten million followers," he nodded at the woman in the yellow sari. "What do we do until then? If we are constantly yearning for material things that we don't have yet, then our happiness is always around the corner. Or at the top of the next mountain. Why do you not wish to be happy here and now? Without needing anything else. Happy as I am?" In a chance encounter with India's Top Ten Social Influencers, the Dalai Lama is asked to how to use the 'law of attraction' to manifest abundance. He points out that material wellbeing was never the goal of such practices as he begins to explain their true purpose. It is a purpose that His Holiness's Cat goes on to explore with her usual warm-hearted and wonky-legged aplomb. Is the world much more a projection of our mind than we suspect? Can a few, precious insights transform our reality? In a drama of intimate revelations as well as panoramic visions, of encounters with much-loved friends along with intriguing newcomers, the Dalai Lama's Cat comes to discover that The Claw of Attraction holds the key to a more sublime transcendence than she ever believed possible. Stretch out your own talons, dear reader, and you may too!

She found her place in a turbulent era of deep passions, heartbreaking sacrifices, and grand dreams. When scholarly, smart Mary Margaret is sixteen, her father marries her off to a drunken neighbor in return for a tract of land. The year is 1924, and Mary Margaret's motherless childhood has already been hard as a farm girl on the desolate prairies of North Dakota. Abused and helpless, the new Mrs. "Marge" Garrity seems destined for a tragic fate. But Marge is determined to make her life count, no matter what. Her escape from her brutal marriage takes her to California, where she struggles to survive the Great Depression and soon answers the lure of the state's untamed northern half. There, embraced by the rough-and-ready people who built the great Ruck-a-chucky Dam on the American River, she begins to find her true mission in life and the possibility for love and happiness with an Army Corp engineer of Cherokee Indian descent. Author Dolores Durando knows Marge's world very well. She grew up ninety years ago on the plains of North Dakota.

In the 1970s, Shelagh Plunkett, a teenage girl from Vancouver, travels with her middle-class family to Guyana and Indonesia, where her father, a civil engineer, has been posted to help with those countries’ water systems. On the surface, she lives a protected life, attending girls’ schools run by nuns and surrounded by household staff. But there is also a fearlessness and recklessness in the girl—a hotel tryst at fifteen, swimming with piranhas, and cavorting with monkeys.

A Middle Eastern-inspired assassin fantasy where muskets and magic collide. Dhani Karim was once the Empire's most feared assassin. Treacherously framed for a murder she didn't commit, she loses everything and is exiled to a remote desert city. There, she's forced to work with a dangerous spy hiding a deadly secret. When she discovers a ruthless cult has plans to seize the city, she must race against time to stop a conspiracy that will consume thousands of innocent lives. With enemies everywhere, she'll need all her assassin's skills. If she survives, someone is going to pay for starting this bloodshed. And then there are those who betrayed her...