Most of me might be worthless; it won’t hurt you to read my thought. I was digging in dark and deep; freezing, shivering, and sometimes hot. Look like lazy and little bit loose; but believe me baby it means a lot. Very different and hard to believe; thought is the same with brand new shot. Somebody should have been upfront; somebody should have opened the naught. You can cook up and twist the tale; someday surely you will get caught. No thank you I don’t ask anything; price or praise no mention not. Highly obliged you will find me; pretty please read it, give it a shot
‘Beautiful, just beautiful. A story – a history really – elegiacally written and filled with everything that makes for an absorbing read: love, intrigue, conflict, mystique, and so much character. Shubnum Khan’s The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil invites us to examine South Africa’s issues of race, class and gender through a refreshingly unique lens. A revelation!’ – SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU, critically acclaimed and award-winning author of The City of Kings Trilogy A haunting, a mystery and a long-forgotten love story intertwine in this tender, lyrical novel about a young girl’s search for belonging Sana and Meena will never meet. The two women share little beyond Akbar Manzil, the sprawling mansion they call home. When Meena fell in love with the owner of the house, it was the grandest residence on South Africa’s east coast near Durban. Eight decades later when Sana follows in her footsteps, the house is crumbling, shabby and dark. This is a place where people come to forget. Or to be forgotten. Full of questions about her new home, Sana is drawn to the deserted east wing. Soon, she begins to discover the tangled, troubling history of the house, dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone at Akbar Manzil – living and dead. Gorgeously atmospheric and endlessly playful, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil is perfect for fans of Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees and Neema Shah’s Kololo Hill.
The social and linguistic history of medieval Sicily is both intriguing and complex. Before the Muslim invasion of 827, the islanders spoke dialects of either Greek or Latin or both. On the arrival of the Normans around 1060 Arabic was the dominant language, but by 1250 Sicily was an almost exclusively Christian island, with Romance dialects in evidence everywhere. Of particular importance to the development of Sicily was the formative period of Norman rule (1061 1194), when most of the key transitions from an Arabic-speaking Muslim island to a 'Latin'-speaking Christian one were made. This work sets out the evidence for those changes and provides an authoritative approach that re-defines the conventional thinking on the subject.
