Majorelle (1886-1962) was a French painter who travelled widely in Italy and Egypt before settling in Morocco in 1917; he became well-known as an Orientalist painter (with shades of Edward H... read more
Based on the Atholl collection of South African art, this superbly produced volume explores themes of transformation and metamorphosis, resistance and affinity, highlighting the fragility of... read more
The rise and fall of the Bacris and Busnachs, two Jewish families whose prominence in trade and banking led them to play a small but crucial diplomatic and logistical role in the Napoleonic ... read more
Brought up in late-Victorian Presbyterian Aberdeenshire, McBey became a war artist in WW1. A decade later he married the American Marguerite Loeb and went to live in Tangier, in a house on O... read more
The British empire observed through the lens of a single day: the 29th September 1923, when the Mandate for Palestine became law and the British empire reached its maximum extent, just as i... read more
Born in Kenya, the author was two when the Mau Mau uprising began. A powerful memoir of this very difficult period and the end of empire in Kenya.The author worked for many years for the BBC... read more
From the author of the breathtaking At Night All Blood is Black (winner of the International Booker Prize in 2021), this novel is another marvel. Set in C18th France and Africa, its protagon... read more
A biography of the city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, once the largest city in the world and for a thousand years the capital of Egypt. Looks at the modern period too.
Enayat al-Zayyat was a young Egyptian woman whose only novel was published posthumously in 1967. Here, one of Egypt's foremost poets creates a portrait not only of Enayat but of literary an... read more
9000BC years ago there were pastoral economies; by 3000BC the desert reasserted itself. A fascinating study of human adaptability in the face of early climate change and geophysical influenc... read more
In two volumes: the photographs in part 1 were taken in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020. Those in part 2 were taken at a sanctuary in Bolivia in 2022. (Each volume is available individually,... read more
Nubia and Egypt, the empires of the Sudan, the kingdoms of Ethiopia and Benin and those of the Asante, Yoruba, Hausa and Zulus... Nine scholars on African kingship; some illustrations.
Ada is not one woman but many: from the Ada that gives birth in pre-colonial west-Africa to a young pregnant Ghanaian arriving in C21st Berlin. Translated from the German.
We walked and dozed in Umberto Pasti's garden with Eden Revisited a few years ago; now we wander his house amongst his treasures - tiles, carpets, textiles... All beautifully photographed t... read more
Gorer met Fran?ois 'F?ral' Benga, the great Senegalese dancer, in the interwar artistic community of Paris in 1934. This is a re-issue of Gorer's remarkable account of their travels around W... read more
Looks at three groups of wandering herders in three very different regions - the Central Sahara, the Arabian Gulf and the Central Eurasian steppes. Many photographs.
A valuable account of one of the greatest advocates in modern history, revered not only in South Africa but around the globe as a defendant of the rule of law.
The range of Blackburn's books testifies to her profound curiosity about the world. This account of her journey (imaginative as well as physical) among the little-known South African people ... read more
A memoir by the Egytian woman who set up an independent book shop with a friend and her sister in 2002 - ten years later it had grown to include ten shops and 150 employees. Full of the nois... read more
A group of international mercenary pilots in Uganda in the mid-1990s fly weapons across Africa, selling them to the highest bidder. A young Congolese cowherd joins them and finds himself in ... read more
Explores the interaction of mass-market diamonds and German colonialism in Africa. Or how the new American fashion for diamond engagement rings funded Germany in two world wars.
In the C13th, the largest library in Europe contained fewer than 2000 books. Baghdad alone contained five libraries with between 200,000 and a million books.
Hugely successful in France, this autobiographical novel moves from the author's happy childhood in Algeria to Paris, where she navigates her own sexuality and the tensions of existing betwe... read more