In My Hands Today…

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To A Mountain in Tibet – Colin Thubron

Mount Kailas is the most sacred of the world’s mountains – holy to one-fifth of humanity. Isolated beyond the central Himalayas, its summit has never been scaled, but for centuries the mountain has been ritually circled by Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims. Colin Thubron joins these pilgrims, after an arduous trek from Nepal, through the high passes of Tibet, to the magical lakes beneath the slopes of Kailas itself. He talks to secluded villagers and to monks in their decaying monasteries; he tells the stories of exiles and of eccentric explorers from the West. Yet he is also walking on a pilgrimage of his own. Having recently witnessed the death of the last of his family, his trek around the great mountain awakens an inner landscape of love and grief, restoring precious fragments of his own.

In My Hands Today…

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The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency – Alexander Mcall Smith 

(The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series, Book 1)

This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors.

In My Hands Today…

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The Wandering Falcon – Jamil Ahmad

The boy known as Tor Baz – the black falcon – wanders between tribes. He meets men who fight under different flags, and women who risk everything if they break their society’s code of honour. Where has he come from, and where will destiny take him?

Set in the decades before the rise of the Taliban, Jamil Ahmad’s stunning debut takes us to the essence of human life in the forbidden areas where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet. Today, the ‘tribal areas’ are often spoken about as a remote region, a hotbed of conspiracies, drone attacks and conflicts. In The Wandering Falcon, this highly  traditional, honour-bound culture is revealed from the inside for the first time as the author, with rare tenderness and affection, describes a world of custom and cruelty, of love and gentleness, of hardship and survival: a fragile, unforgiving world that is changing as modern forces make themselves known.

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The Truth About Anna and Other Stories – William Warren

William Warren’s writings on Asia have entertained and informed readers all over the world for 40 years. As he says, ‘Even as a child, I preferred the unusual to the ordinary, the little-known to the familiar; and such inclinations remained with me as I grew up, determining what sort of books I particularly enjoyed, the places I wanted most to visit, and, after I started writing, the subjects that most appealed to me.’ The essays in this book, all of them about Asia and collected here for the first time, are linked by a taste for oddity and romance.

Their subjects range from Anna Leonowens – generally known as the sugar-sweet heroine of The King and I, but revealed here as a somewhat different Anna, less appealing but more interesting – to the significance of amulets and of shrines, Asian women, cobra as a gastronomic treat, the myth surrounding Jim Thompson, and the truth behind some of the Asian writings of Somerset Maugham – to name just a few.

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In the Wake of Terror – Rosaly Puthucheary

In the Wake of Terror is a thought-provoking narrative of a 25-year-old immigrant, Li Mei, a medical doctor and writer, in search of a new identity in a politically awakened Singapore in the fifties.

The novel dramatises the crucial years before the People’s Action Party comes into power, and examines how a doctor, wife of a police officer, is forced to become aware of the unnamed feelings in the substratum of her being in the city. The story is woven into the fabric of a society suffering from the aftermath of terror.