Travels in a Dervish Coat by Isambard Wilkinson
Here’s a book to pop your eyes. Cloaked in dust and petals it swirls through bedrooms, bazaars, bombings, palaces, shrines, caves and festivals. The pace is insistent and the tensions increasing.
Our guide is journalist Isambard Wilkinson. He takes us to Pakistan (2006 – 2009) and entices us to follow him from Baluchistan to the Khyber Pass, via a couple of pauses for kidney complications.
Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich (Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
I was at St Andrews University in Scotland, when the accident happened … “the gravest technological catastrophe of the twentieth century.” It was 26 April, 1986.
Reactor No.4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Belarus collapsed.
We visited this little lodge last August, towards the end of our two years near Naples, Italy. It was evening when we arrived. The heat had gone, the light bounced off the lake, and wedding parties posed on the bridge.
La Casina Vanvitelliana in Lago Fusaro, Campania, Italy
If I had the money to save a building of all those that I have seen this is the one that I would save.
We saw it for the first time this summer – small, elegant, corroded and propped up; its perfect proportions reflected in the blue green lake as the sun went down.
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The Phraser 