Australasian & Pacific history

Showing all 2 resultsSorted by latest

  • The Migrants

    £25.00

    Christopher de Hamel is one of the world’s best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four. This book magically evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realization that they too are migrants far from home. ‘The Migrants’ explores the immense journeys of books and people. It is a tale of colonization and the migration of culture, of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters, bringing us face-to-face with history.

  • Question 7

    £10.99

    Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, ‘Question 7’ is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. By way of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.