9781914420054
250 pp PB 197 x 130 mm
Mono
£10.99 / $14.95
Politics
World rights available
The missing people are actually dead, claimed Sri Lanka’s President in an attempt to seal — and silence — the past. Twelve Cries from Home is a refusal of that silence.
A memoir of many voices, it takes the reader on a journey across Sri Lanka mapped by the stories of twelve witnesses, mainly women and relatives of the disappeared, whose deeply personal memories challenge official truths. It lays bare the brutal realities of a twenty-six-year civil war as told to the author just months before a regime change brought back the fear of speaking out.
Returning to the concept of home as a place of security, Twelve Cries from Home draws a portrait of post-war Sri Lanka invoking a local measure of distance — the call, or hoowa — to ask how we might attend to stories that are difficult to tell and to hear.
Minoli Salgado is Professor of International Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place and Broken Jaw.
9781913462987
450 pp PB 197 x 130 mm
Mono
£10.99 / $14.95
Cultural Studies / History
World rights available
Rural England is a mythic space, a complex canvas on which people from many different backgrounds project all kinds of fantasies, prejudices, desires and fears.
Return of a Native seeks to challenge many of these ideas, showing how the artificial divide between rural and urban works to conceal the underlying relationship between these two fundamental poles of human settlement.
Through stories, interviews and reportage gathered over two decades, this book demolishes tired notions of rural England that cast it as a separate realm of existence and poses two simple questions: What does the word “rural” mean today? What will it mean tomorrow?
Vron Ware has been writing about racism, gender, history and national identity since the 1980s. She has worked as a journalist, photographer, environmental designer and academic.