9 Months in TibetA fascinating and thoroughly engrossing tale Alexander McCall Smith 9 Months in Tibet is about overcoming the fear of travelling alone, getting a job in Lhasa, riding a horse through Eastern Tibet, falling in love with Italian women, witnessing a violent protest between Buddhist monks and the Chinese police and getting expelled from the country for not helping the police with their enquiries.

animals and objects alike

and again located in the Jarrow of the 1940s where the author grew up

most difficult corners of the world today

liberation

Banipal 69 opens by saluting in texts by two of its major authors

exhilarating

Mihai Ursachi

Hai Rui is ordered to the capital

Continuing the theme of lost worlds captured in our last issue by Ros Garland

"A defiant individualist

they also confront the isolating nature of the dictatorship he lived through as well as the aggressively optimistic discourse of post-dictatorship “modernization” efforts: the torrential influx of mass media and multinational corporations

Interspersed with a sequence on the deteriorating health of her father