Eland Publishing: 66 books

The journals of Lady Henrietta Clive, a feisty, independent-minded traveller, are among the very earliest written accounts of India by a British woman. Married to Lord Edward Clive, son of Clive of India and Governor of Madras (1798-1803), she travelled through southern India with her daughters and...

For two years in the early 1980s, Monica Connell lived as a paying guest of Kalchu and Chola in the Nepalese village of Talphi. Gradually she was accepted as a member of the family, sharing its joys and sorrows as well as taking part in its various tasks, from mud plastering the house to rice planting...

In 1924, Robert Frisbie arrived on the island of Puka-Puka, one of the most remote in the South Pacific, to run a trading post. Within months he had learned the language and become absorbed into the ways of its ancient, indigenous community – fishing, picnicking, swimming, sleeping and falling in...

In a ruined temple on the Nile, Anthony Sattin sees a woman praying to the gods of ancient Egypt to bless her with a child. Later in central Cairo he experiences the exuberant celebrations of a saint's day and hears their stony condemnation by an Islamist. The ancient continues to rub up against the...

The Villa Ariadne stands above the Minoan ruins of Knossos in Crete, a memorial to the British archaeologists who built, lived and worked there. Dilys Powell brings to life the autocratic founder Arthur Evans and his successor John Pendlebury, whose heroic leadership of the local defence against German...

The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool chronicles a series of friendships and conversations pursued over ten years with an erratic cast of Syrians that includes Abed, the unemployable ‘street philosopher’ and Sulayman, ‘the holy fool’, alongside Myrna, a Christian healer marked by the stigmata...

Having learned to appreciate Muslim life while living in Pakistan, Peter Mayne settled down to live in the back streets of Marrakesh in the 1950s. Rather than watch from the shelter of a hotel terrace, he rented rooms, learned the language, made friends, and became embroiled in conspiratorial picni,...

Mother Land is an autobiographical novel, a minutely remembered description of childhood on an Aegean island, marked by the furious opposition of hostile yet neighbouring cultures. Dmetri Kakmi was born into an age-old Greek community on the now-Turkish island of Bozcaada in the early 1960s. His nine-year-old...

On the eve of Mao’s revolution, brilliant linguist Peter Goullart made himself totally at home in Likiang, capital of the all-but-forgotten Nakhi Kingdom of south west China. He unpicks the complex society, which believed simultaneously in Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Animism and Shamanism. Goullart...

Kezzie, a museum curator and photographer mourning the recent death of her husband, comes to myth-steeped Tuluva, now South Kanara, India to photograph spirit dancers (bhutas). Drawn by these souls, who died precipitously leaving them with a strong sense of a life yet to live, Kezzie is at first unsure...