• Jubber, Nicholas
• Da Capo Press
• $$35.00

A Journey through the inside-out worlds of Iran and Afghanistan.

Setting out to gain insight into the lives of Iranians and Afghans today, Nicholas Jubber is surprised to uncover the legacy of a vibrant pre-Islamic Persian culture that has endured even in times of the most fanatic religious fundamentalism. Everywhere- from underground dance parties to religious shrines to opium dens- he finds powerful and unbreakable connections to a time when both Iran and Afghanistan were part of the same mighty empire, when the flame of Persian culture lit up the world.

• Girardet, Edward
• Chelsea Green
• $

As a young foreign correspondent, Edward Girardet arrived in Afghanistan just three months prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. Over the next decades he trekked hundreds of miles across rugged mountains and deserts following Afghanistan guerillas in battle as they smuggled French doctors into the country, and as they combated each other as well as invaders. Killing the Cranes documents Girardet’s eyewitness accounts of the world’s greatest refugee exodus, the bitter Battle for Kabul in the early 1990s, the rise of the Taliban, and, finally the US-led Western military and recovery effort that began in 2001 and has lasted more than a decade. Giradet provides crucial insights into why the West’s current involvement has turned into such a disaster, not only rekindling a new insurgency, but squandering billions of dollars on a recovery process that has shown scant success.

• Goldsworthy, Kerryn
• NewSouth Publishing
• $29.95

Any place you have experienced first-hand is a museum of memory, one whose exhibits conjure up, in widening ripples of association, a whole city: a red paddle-boat, a photograph of three children on a hot day, a marble Venus fetchingly half-naked in the shade.

Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Adelaide isa museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city trough a collection of iconic objects. Through these Goldsworthy explores the beautiful, commonplace, dark and contradictory history of Adelaide: the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive politics and the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors and the homey friendliness. She paints a lively portrait of her home city – as lived in, missed, loved, hated – but mainly as it exists in her memory and imagination.

• Pamuk, Orhan
• Hamish Hamilton
• $30.00

In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, the old widow Fatma awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the vollage for decades, ever since her husband, and idealistic young doctor, first arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her faithful servant Recep, a dwarf and the doctor’s illegitimate son. They share memories, and grievances, of the early years, before Cennethisar became a high-class resort.

Her visiting grandchildren are Faruk, a dissipated failed historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgun; and Metin, a high-school student drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riches, who dreams of going to America. But it is Recep’s nephew Hassan, a high-school drop-out  lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists, who will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey’s tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.