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South African author and playwright Athol Fugard’s recently-published novel Tsotsi, is a compelling and brutal tale that follows the life of the story’s eponymous protagonist. Set in Sophiatown — a black township in Johannesburg that was razed in the 1950s to make way for homes for the whites — Fugard uses the oppression of the […]

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U-THANT’S GRANDSON SPEAKS: The family’s ardent love for Burma lives on Despite being born in New York in the 1960s, Thant Myint-U’s memories are of a childhood steeped inBurmese culture. Life in his maternal grandfather U-Thant’s house in Riverdale, just outside of Manhattan, was a stark contrast to the icy, snowy winters and bright lights […]

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If there’s one quality that defines Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses, it’s subtlety. This collection of eight short stories is a masterpiece of observation which clearly demonstrates the author’s perceptive wit. Set in the 1950s, amidst the corridors and offices of the newly-created monolithic and meandering bureaucracy of “the Organization”– read the United Nations […]

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It’s Friday afternoon, and after a particularly busy week, with only a few things to wrap up, I try and scratch off the last important thing on my list of things to do – interview author/journalist Tom Hodgkinson. First I try his London office a number of times, only to get the following answer-phone message: […]

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Bangkok

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Nation answers rising demand for outsourced call centres India’s call centres employ up to 250,000 people. The world’s second most populous nation is picking up the phone for British and US companies seeking cost savings THE TAJ MAHAL, the Golden Temple of Amritsar, and the high-altitude paradise of Ladakh are just a few of the […]

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Fan Wu’s debut novel February Flowers is a deeply compelling coming of age story, centred around two female university students in Guangzhou, China. Narrated by protagonist Chen Ming, which means “Morning Bright”, readers are introduced to a nation and a people in flux. China in 1991 was caught up in the tensions and conflicts between […]

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Kay Danes’ Nightmare in Laos: The True Story of a Woman Imprisoned in a Communist Gulag is her harrowing personal account of being locked up for a crime she didn’t commit, in a country where human rights are pure fiction. Danes and her husband Kerry, a former Australian SAS officer, established Lao Securicor Company in […]

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In 1967, as the insanity of the Cultural Revolution surged through China, Sirin Pathanothai was hauled up in front of the Red Guards and the Thai Patriotic Front and denounced for being a bourgeois diehard, a capitalist “roader,” and an imperialist lackey. She could not reveal the fact that both she and her elder brother […]

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In 1997, Debbie Singh received a phone call from her mother that would change her life forever. It concerned a letter from Debbie’s adopted brother John, who was in Thailand. “Dear Mum, Sorry it’s taken so long to write but I’ve been putting it off until it had been so long I didn’t know where […]

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