A hardback best-seller and nominee for the Booker Prize, finally back in print after three years of rights battles, this literary masterpiece documents the first Anglo-Chinese Opium War through the eyes of two young Americans on the China Coast in the 1830s. 'A marvellous, monumental achievement, highly intelligent, witty and having the gravitas of true historical insight... A first-class historical novel of tremendous sweep' - Spectator 'Astute and unremitting' - Glasgow Herald 'Powerful, beautifully written' - Guardian
"In the early 1800s, the Chinese Empire became a reluctant host to a variety of Canton-based Occidental trading companies, eager to relieve it of tea and silver. In exchange, England soothed the Chinese with vast quantities of Indian opium, a practice much deplored but soon to be emulated by their American competitors. In Mo's third novel (after The Monkey King and Sour Sweet, two young Americans, Walter Eastman and Gideon Chase, resolve to expose this and other abuses by leaving their trading company to start a newspaper. They are soon embroiled, as observers and participants, in a series of skirmishes later known as the Opium Wars, until a final Chinese victory relegates all traders to that unsettled territory, Hong Kong..." --
This book is a researched study of land issues in American Sāmoa that analyzes the impact of U.S. colonialism and empire building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carefully tracing changes in land laws up to the present, this volume also draws on a careful examination of legal traditions, administrative decisions, court cases and rising tensions between indigenous customary land tenure practices in American Sāmoa and Western notions of individual private ownership. It also highlights how unusual the status of American Sāmoa is in its relationship with the U.S., namely as the only “unincorporated” and “unorganized” overseas territory, and aims to expand the U.S. empire-building scholarship to include and recognize American Sāmoa into the vernacular of Americanization projects.
Winner of the E.M. Forster Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this brutal and beautiful narration of the guerrilla war against the Indonesians in Timor, praised by Fretilin Foreign Minister and Nobel prize-winner Jose Ramos-Horta for its 'perfect authenticity', reappears now in this handsome edition at a topical moment in history as Timor fully joins the UN at last. ''Magnificent' - The Spectator 'A marvellous tour de force' - Evening Standard 'A brilliant novel, written with precision and tenderness' - Guardian
Recipient of the 2014 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award A major debut from an award-winning writer—an epic family saga set against the magic and the rhythms of the Virgin Islands. In the early 1900s, the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule, and an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea. Orphaned by the shipwreck are two sisters and their half brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them. Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic, set against the emergence of Saint Thomas into the modern world. Uniquely imagined, with echoes of Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and the author’s own Caribbean family history, the story is told in a language and rhythm that evoke an entire world and way of life and love. Following the Bradshaw family through sixty years of fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, love affairs, curses, magical gifts, loyalties, births, deaths, and triumphs, Land of Love and Drowning is a gorgeous, vibrant debut by an exciting, prizewinning young writer.
Timothy Mo's classic account of feuding Chinese families in sixties London quickly became a best-seller when it was first published and has since won its place among the novels of the time. Filmed by Mike Newell with a screenplay by Ian McEwan, it now appears for the first time on the Paddleless list.
Part of the Penguin History of Britain series, An Imperial Possession is the first major narrative history of Roman Britain for a generation. David Mattingly draws on a wealth of new findings and knowledge to cut through the myths and misunderstandings that so commonly surround our beliefs about this period. From the rebellious chiefs and druids who led native British resistance, to the experiences of the Roman military leaders in this remote, dangerous outpost of Europe, this book explores the reality of life in occupied Britain within the context of the shifting fortunes of the Roman Empire.
External Possession Constructions (EPCs) are found in nearly all parts of the world and across widely divergent language families. The data-rich papers in this first-ever volume on EPCs document their typological variability, explore diachronic reasons for variations, and investigate their functions and theoretical ramifications. EPCs code the possessor as a core grammatical relation of the verb and in a constituent separate from that which contains the possessed item. Though EPCs express possession, they do so without the necessary involvement of a possessive predicate such as “have” or “own”. In many cases, EPCs appear to “break the rules” about how many arguments a verb of a given valence can have. They thus constitute an important limiting case for evaluating theories of the relationship between verbal argument structure and syntactic clause structure. They also raise core questions about intersections among verbal valence, cognitive event construal, voice, and language processing.
Rey Castro belongs to a small but highly,distinctive tribe: he is a black Amerasian. Born,in destitution in the Philippines to a bar girl,mother, he is fortunate enough to be taken under,the wing of an eccentric Jesuit. However, fate,takes a hand when he is made the scapegoat for a,crime he did not commit and is forced into,semi-slavery overseas. Adventure piles on,adventure in old-fashioned style but Timothy Mo's,sixth novel is both traditional and devastatingly,contemporary. Characters real enough to touch, dry,wit, and unique style are all here.
