The Boy In The Oversized Smock

This is the simple but powerful biographical story of Mensa. Mensa went to school under the colonial British educational system during the eventful post-independence years. The profession of his parents, who were both teachers, put him always on the move. But his problems of movement were compounded when the parents divorced. Eventually he ended up in boarding school, and he loved it to death because the alternative was a nonexistent home life. The novel captures his life from school to school, hopping from home to home. It is mostly about boarding school life interlaced with wicked humor. A parallel poignant story is the story of kids from broken homes, especially the one in which the woman plays the role of the vanished parent.

This book investigates how cooking, eating, and identity are connected to the local micro-climates in each of Ghana’s major eco-culinary zones. The work is based on several years of researching Ghanaian culinary history and cuisine, including field work, archival research, and interdisciplinary investigation. The political economy of Ghana is used as an analytical framework with which to investigate the following questions: How are traditional food production structures in Ghana coping with global capitalist production, distribution, and consumption? How do land, climate, and weather structure or provide the foundation for food consumption and how does that affect the separate traditional and capitalist production sectors? Despite the post WWII food fight that launched Ghana’s bid for independence from the British empire, Ghana’s story demonstrates the centrality of local foods and cooking to its national character. The cultural weight of regional traditional foods, their power to satisfy, and the overall collective social emphasis on the ‘proper’ meal, have persisted in Ghana, irrespective of centuries of trade with Europeans. This book will be of interest to scholars in food studies, comparative studies, and African studies, and is sure to capture the interest of students in new ways.

Up in Mahaica: Stories from the Market People is a collection of short stories about unusual characters in an oil refinery in southern Trinidad. They scheme against each other and resort to obeah to win affection or to avenge real or imagined offenses. And through it all, most residents secretly want to abandon the poverty of their post colonial existence and escape to the middleclass mirage the oil company created up in Mahaica. The open-air market vendors, the only ones not beholden to the British company, hold the community's secrets.

“One of the fifty most influential books of the last half of the twentieth century,” a comic novel about a therapist making life choices by rolling dice. (BBC) The cult classic that can still change your life . . . Let the dice decide! This is the philosophy that changes the life of bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart―and in some ways changes the world as well. Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time. “A fine piece of fiction . . . touching, ingenious and beautifully comic.” —Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange “Luke Rhinehart and THE DICE MAN have launched a psychiatric revolution.” —London Sunday Telegraph “A blackly comic amusement park of a book.” —TIME Magazine “Weird, hilarious . . . an outlandishly enjoyable book.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Witty reckless clever . . . . a caper at the edge of nihilism.” —LIFE Magazine “Brilliant . . . much like CATCH-22 . . . the sex extra-juicy.” —The Houston Post “Outrageously funny.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram “Hilarious and well-written . . . A brilliant summary of modern nihilism. Dice living will be popular, no doubt of that.” —Time Out (London)

The seventh Commissario Ricciardi historical mystery is “an intricately layered whodunit set in Fascist Naples . . . A richly textured story” (Kirkus Reviews). In the middle of a summer heat wave, as Naples prepares for one of its most important holy days, a renowned surgeon falls to his death from the window of his office. For Commissario Ricciardi and Brigadier Maione it is the beginning of an investigation that will bring them into contact with the most torrid, conflicting, and enduring of human passions. In the world Ricciardi and Maione are about to enter, infidelity appears inextricable from the most joyful expressions of love, and, this interdependence sows doubt and uncertainty in both men, compromising their own attempts at love. Ricciardi is one of the most intriguing and unique figures to appear in crime fiction in recent years. He possesses the dubious gift of being able to see and hear the last seconds in the lives of those who have suffered a violent death. This ability makes him an unusually effective investigator but plagues him and renders human relationships almost impossible. He is a classic noir hero and the cursed son of a city that, for all its Mediterranean splendor, is a perfect noir city. In this new installment in the Commissario Ricciardi series, Maurizio de Giovanni creates a large cast of unforgettable characters and a compelling, suspenseful plot that demonstrates once more why he is considered one of the best crime writers working today. “Complex, lyrical . . . A searing look at the tortured soul of the lead makes this entry especially memorable.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

'A born storyteller' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH . Dreadfully injured in the Arnhem landings, paratrooper Theo Trickey was never expected to survive. Medical Officer Captain Daniel Garland pulled Trickey's comatose body from a pile of corpses, keeping him alive as they were shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. As Garland discovers, Trickey has had a remarkable war. Boy soldier, commando, paratrooper, intelligence officer – fighting from northern France to the African desert. But that's not all. What was Trickey's connection with Germany's greatest general, the recently deceased Erwin Rommel? Why have the Desert Fox's loyalest officers tracked him down and just what is it that they want Garland to do? Freefall is the second part of Radcliffe's Airborne trilogy which tells the extraordinary story of a young soldier, a new regiment and how, together, they changed the course of a war. 'A must-read: deft, vivid, painfully well-observed' Graham Hurley, author of Finisterre.

'One of the best books I've read in the last five or ten years... Wild is angry, brave, sad, self-knowing, redemptive, raw, compelling, and brilliantly written, and I think it's destined to be loved by a lot of people, men and women, for a very long time.' Nick Hornby