Eland Press

 

Eland was started in 1982 to revive great travel books that had fallen out of print. These are books for readers who aspire to explore the world and for travellers who are also content to explore new cultures and environments from their armchairs.

Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian

John Beames

These memoirs were discovered in the 1950s when the author's grandson was sifting material for Philip Mason's The Men Who Ruled India. Beames arrived in the sub-continent just after the Mutiny, and stayed for the next thirty-five years. Unlike most diarists of the Victorian Raj, he was completely outspoken and wrote plain lively prose. The result is probably the most vivid description of a District Officer's life in India.

Eland 1961

ISBN 0907871097

Pbk £12.99

A Visit to Don Otavio

Sybille Bedford

Mexico, through the eyes of Sybille Bedford is a country of passion and paradox: arid desert and shrieking jungle, harsh sun and deep shadow, violence and sentimentality. In her frank descriptions of the horrors of travel - through bug-infested jungle, trapped in a broiling stationary train, or in a bus with a dead fish slapping against her face - she gains our trust.

But it is the charmed world of Don Otavio which steals our imagination. He is, she says, "one of the kindest men I ever met". She stays in his crumbling ancestral mansion, living a life of provincial ease and observing with glee the intense life of a Mexican neighbourhood.

Eland 1953

ISBN 0907871879

Pbk £12.99

Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education

Sybille Bedford

This intensely remembered, partly autobiographical novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, describes the childhood of Billi, a girl growing up in Europe between the wars. When her father dies, she swaps life in a run-down German château for an exhilarating existence with her beautiful, talented and unreliable mother on the French Riviera.

Sent away to England for schooling, the gypsy-like Billi ricochets between short-lived tutors and a life of reading, friends and public lectures. Returning to the Mediterranean, her unorthodox education - intellectual, emotional and sexual - continues among the vibrant community of artists, exiles and intellectuals who have colonised the coast, coaxing her towards a life of literature.

Eland 1989

ISBN 0907871798

Pbk £12.99

Journey Into The Mind's Eye

Lesley Blanch

Lesley Blanch was four when the mysterious Traveller first blew into her nursery, swathed in Siberian furs and full of the fairytales of Russia. She was twenty when he swept out of her life, leaving her love-lorn and in the grips of a passionate obsession. The search to recapture the love of her life, and the Russia he had planted within her, takes her to Siberia and beyond, journeying deep into the romantic terrain of the mind's eye.

Eland 1968, 2005

ISBN 9780907871545

Pbk £12.99

Travels With Myself and Another

Martha Gellhorn

Out of a lifetime of travelling, Martha Gellhorn has selected her "best horror journeys". She bumps through rain-sodden, war-torn China to meet Chiang Kai-Shek, floats listlessly in search of u-boats in the wartime Caribbean and visits a dissident writer in the Soviet Union against her better judgement. Written with the eye of a novelist and an ironic black humour, what makes these tales irresistible are Gellhorn's explosive and often surprising reactions. Indignant, but never righteous and not always right, through the crucible of hell on earth emerges a woman who makes you laugh with her at life, while thanking God that you are not with her.

Eland 1978

ISBN 0907871771

Pbk £12.99

The Last Leopard: A Biography of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

David Gilmour

David Gilmour's biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of The Leopard, one of the great novels of the twentieth century. A book whose imagery, once tasted, haunts the reader for ever, The Leopard describes the golden era of nineteenth-century Sicily in all its sensual, fading, aristocratic glory. But beneath the surface lurk Sicily's millennial contagions - corruption, brutality and inequality. Who wrote this masterpiece, this work of art? The answer is as unlikely as one might hope. A fascinating meditation on what it is that makes a writer.

Eland 2007

ISBN 9780955010514

Pbk £12.99

Peking Story

David Kidd

In 1949 David Kidd's Chinese fiancée telephoned to say that her father was dying and that they must marry immediately. She was the daughter of an ancient Mandarin family living in a magnificent mansion surrounded by many courtyards. Her wedding in Peking was one of the last great ceremonies of a four thousand-year-old culture. At first the couple were able to continue their privileged life, a remnant of an old and exquisite culture. But Peking had recently surrendered to a communist army, and the new proletarianism was rapidly suppressing the ancient traditions. Spies watched them from the roof and then confiscated their sets of mahjong; an aunt was sent on a mission to re-educate prostitutes; and the family's final magnificent party was invaded by the police. Eventually their entire way of life was overwhelmed by the new totalitarian regime.

Eland 1961

ISBN 090787147x

Pbk £12.99

Scum of the Earth

Arthur Koestler

A brand new edition of Arthur Koestler's gripping tale of arrest, imprisonment and subsequent escape to London from Nazi-occupied France

Eland 2003

ISBN 0907871496

Pbk £12.99

Hill of Kronos

Peter Levi

Peter Levi paints a radiant portrait of the Greece he came to know through a lifetime of exploration. As a young scholar he sought out its ancient spirit, the keys to its mythology and civilisation, in its ruined cities and majestic mountains. Later, as a priest working as a diplomat and a friend of the oppressed, he lived in Athens through the dark days of the dictatorship. The sinews of political life led back to secret alliances made during the civil war and the earlier occupation of Greece, back to murder, starvation and corpse-filled quarries.

Lastly he sees the country through the mature eyes of a family man, with the ripened sensibility of an acclaimed poet. This is a precious fusion of experience and insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.

Eland 2007

ISBN 9780955010545

Pbk £12.99

A View of the World: Selected Journalism

Norman Lewis

Collected between these covers are twenty of Norman Lewis's finest pieces of travel writing, spanning a period of 30 years. He brings us face to face with Castro's executioner, with a tragic Ernest Hemingway and with the unchanged lifestyle of fishermen in an unspoilt Ibiza. He describes the gentle pleasures of Belize, the ferocious blood feuds of Sardinian bandits and the unpleasant duty of repatriating Cossacks to the Soviet Union in 1944
At the heart of the collection is Lewis's famous report on the genocide of the Brazilians Indians, which led to the creation of Survival International - which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples. This, Lewis felt, was the most important achievement of his professional life.

For more books by Norman Lewis, please click here

Eland 1986

ISBN 9780907871439

Pbk £12.99

Naples '44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth

Norman Lewis

Norman Lewis arrives in war-torn Naples as an intelligence officer in 1944. The starving population has devoured all the tropical fish in the aquarium, respectable women have been driven to prostitution and the black market is king.

Lewis finds little to admire in his fellow soldiers, but gains sustenance from the extraordinary vivacity of the Italians. There is the lawyer who earns his living bringing a touch of Roman class to funerals, the gynaecologist who "specializes in the restoration of lost virginity" and the widowed housewife who times her British lover against the clock. "Were I given the chance to be born again," writes Lewis, "Italy would be the country of my choice."

Eland 1978

ISBN 0907871720

Pbk £12.99

Golden Earth

Norman Lewis

Despite communist incursions and tribal insurrection, Norman Lewis describes a land of breath-taking natural beauty peopled by the gentle Burmese. This is a country where Buddhist beliefs spare even the rats, where the Director of Prisons quotes Chaucer and where three-day theatrical shows are staged to celebrate a monk taking orders. Hitching lifts with the army and with travelling merchants, Lewis is treated to hospitality wherever he stops in this war-torn land, and reveals a country where 'the condition of the soul replaces that of the stock markets as a topic for polite conversation'.

Eland 1952

ISBN 0907871380

Pbk £12.99

The Honoured Society

Norman Lewis

The Honoured Society describes how the US army returned the Mafia to power in 1944, after Mussolini came close to destroying them. It looks at the Mafia in their homeland - how in attempting to preserve Sicily for the Sicilians in the face of countless invasions it infiltrated every aspect of the island's life, corrupting landowners, the police, the judiciary and even the church. In one chilling chapter Norman Lewis details the escapades of eighty-year-old Padre Camelo, who led his monks on sprees of murder and extortion, frequently using the confessional box for transmitting threats.

Eland 1964

ISBN 0907871488

Pbk £12.99

A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

Norman Lewis

Travelling through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the twilight of the French colonial regime, Norman Lewis witnesses these ancient civilisations as they were before the terrible devastation of the Vietnam War. He creates a portrait of traditional societies struggling to retain their integrity in the embrace of the West. He meets emperors and slaves, brutal plantation owners and sympathetic French officers trapped by the economic imperatives of the colonial experiment. From tribal animists to Viet-Minh guerillas, he witnesses this heart-breaking struggle over and over, leaving a vital portrait of a society on the brink of catastrophic change.

Eland 1951

ISBN 090787133x

Pbk £12.99

The Island that Dared

Dervla Murphy

Take a three-generation family holiday in Cuba in the company of Dervla Murphy, her daughter and three young granddaughters and you have a Swallows and Amazon like adventure in the Caribean as they trek into the hills and along the coast as a family, camping out on empty beaches beneath the stars and relishing the ubiquitous Cuban hospitality.

But this is no more than the joyful start of a fully-fledged quest to understand the unique society created by the Cuban Revolution. For Dervla returns alone to explore the mountains, coastal swamps and decaying cities, investigating the experience of modern Cuba with her particular, candid curiosity. Through her own research and through conversations with Fidelistas and their critics alike, The Island That Dared builds a complex picture of a people struggling to retain their identity in the face of insistent hostility of the government of the United States.

Eland Press 2010

(Signed copies available)

ISBN 9781906011468

Pbk £12.99

Meetings with Remarkable Muslims

Barnaby Rogerson (ed.)

A collection of personal reminiscences of friendships and chance encounters which have left an indelible mark on the author. Throwing a bridge across the divide, it shows how immeasurably richer our lives are for sharing different cultural traditions. This diverse collection of writers draws together a world stretching from Morocco in the west to India in the east.

Sarah Anderson writes about the Spanish/Moroccan traveller of the late fifteenth century Leo Africanus.

Other contributors include Peter Clark, William Dalrymple, Jason Elliot, James Fergusson, Sylvie Franquet, Shusha Guppy, Mark Hudson, Brigid Keenan, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Sheila Paine, Tahir Shah and Jasper Winn.

Eland 2005

ISBN 9780955010507

Pbk £12.99

Marrakesh: Through Writer's Eyes

Barnaby Rogerson (ed.)

An exploration of the city's mystique through the fiction, speculations and scholarship of forty travel writers who have succumbed to the enchantment of the city.
Writers include Elias Canetti, Peter Mayne, Esther Freud, Gavin Maxwell, Walter Harris, Leo Africanus, and Joseph Thomson.

Eland 2003

ISBN 9780907871996

Pbk £12.99

The Law

Roger Vailland

The novel’s ostensible story is secondary to the description of relationships within a small Southern-Italian community. Vailland makes us understand how everyone, monarchist lord of the manor, the amorous Donna Lucrezia, the wealthy racketeer, and the landless day-labourer, are all affected by the ancient complexities of an hierarchical society.

Eland 1957

ISBN 0907871119

Pbk £12.99

The Village in the Jungle

Leonard Woolf

This novel set in Ceylon follows the lives of a handful of villagers hacking out a fragile existence in a jungle where indiscriminate growth, indifferent fate and malevolent neighbours constantly threaten to overwhelm them. It is as if Thomas Hardy were immersed in the heat, scent, sensuality and pungent mystery of the tropics.

Seven years as a colonial administrator gave Woolf first-hand knowledge of the injustice of colonial rule, and an acute psychological sympathy with the villagers. He skillfully incorporates local story-telling traditions and beliefs into his chilling narrative, to create a book which remains one of the best-loved in Sri Lanka to this day.

Eland 1913

ISBN 0907871291

Pbk £12.99

The Ginger Tree

Oswald Wynd

In 1903 Mary Mackenzie sails for China to marry the British Military Attache, a man who turns out to be every bit as chilly as the Peking Winter. During one of his many absences, Mary has an affair with a Japanese soldier, Count Kurihama, but her pregnancy is impossible to keep secret.

Rejected by husband, mother and country, and forced to leave her daughter behind, Mary flees to Japan. The Ginger Tree tells the fascinating story of her survival, isolated and alone, in this alien culture.

Eland 1977

ISBN 0907871038

Pbk £12.99

 

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