The Valley At The Centre Of The World

Longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize Shetland: a place of sheep and soil, of harsh weather, close ties and an age-old way of life. A place where David has lived all his life, like his father and grandfather before him. A place that Alice has fled to after the death of her husband. A place where Sandy, a newcomer but already a crofter, may have finally found a home. But times do change, and the valley that they all call home must change with them, or be forgotten. The debut novel from one of our most exciting new literary voices, The Valley at the Centre of the World is a story about community and isolation, about what is passed down, and what is lost between the cracks.

2024-25 IAS/PSC General Studies Indian & World Geography

This book examines the U.S. international trade finance system, including the banks that finance trade; the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which guarantees and insures those trade credits; the Foreign Credit Insurance Association, which insures trade credits; the Public Export Funding Corporation, which makes loans to foreign buyers of U.S. exports; and the federal, state, and local agencies and private institutions that facilitate U.S. trade. Major foreign export credit agencies are discussed and compared with the American system, which is the most comprehensive in the world in its facilitation of financing U.S. export trade.

An encyclopedia designed especially to meet the needs of elementary, junior high, and senior high school students.

This book presents new translations of a selection of Latin and French pilgrimage texts - and two in Greek - relating to Jerusalem and the Holy Land between the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 and the loss of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291. It therefore complements and extends existing studies, which deal with the period from Late Antiquity to Saladin's conquest. Such texts provide a wealth of information not only about the business of pilgrimage itself, but also on church history, topography, architecture and the social and economic conditions prevailing in Palestine in this period. Pilgrimage texts of the 13th century have not previously been studied as a group in this way; and, because the existing editions of them are scattered across a variety of rather obscure publications, they tend to be under-utilized by historians, despite their considerable interest. For instance, they are often more original than the texts of the 12th century, representing first-hand accounts of travellers rather than simple reworkings of older texts. Taken together, they document the changes that occurred in the pattern of pilgrimage after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, during its brief reoccupation by the Franks between 1229 and 1244, and during the period from 1260 onwards when the Mamluks gradually took military control of the whole country. In the 1250s-60s, for example, because of the difficulties faced by pilgrims in reaching Jerusalem itself, there developed an alternative set of holy sites offering indulgences in Acre. The bringing of Transjordan, southern Palestine and Sinai under Ayyubid and, later, Mamluk control also encouraged the development of the pilgrimage to St Catherine's monastery on Mount Sinai in this period. The translations are accompanied by explanatory footnotes and preceded by an introduction, which discusses the development of Holy Land pilgrimage in this period and the context, dating and composition of the texts themselves. The book concludes with a comprehensive list of sources and a detailed index.