Böcker av Alex Klaushofer

Once cut off from the rest of Europe by dictator Enver Hoxha, Albania has long been a source of fascination for Alex Klaushofer. Thirty years after the fall of communism, she spends a spring in Tirana, gaining a privileged insight into the country as it strives to join the modern West.Volunteering at Tirana's first hostel and interviewing a wide range of people, the author talks to a political prisoner about his experiences under the regime and meets the student activists trying to change a system which is still corrupt. She hears about the discrimination suffered by the disabled and sees how a new culture of caring for animals is slowly developing. She learns how, in a state where religion was banned, faith is making a comeback, why trafficking takes place and discovers how profoundly the architecture reflects the changing fortunes of the city.A compelling narrative and piece of informed reportage, Spyless in Tirana provides a rare insight into a colourful, chaotic country that is utterly unlike any other.Please note that as a 'travella' of 35,000 words, the book is about the third of the length of a conventional travelogue.

Alex Klaushofer started gathering ghost stories accidentally when first one person, then another, told her of their encounters with the supernatural. Her collection grew and she realised that more people than you would imagine have direct experience of the uncanny and that ordinary places hold layers of human experience.The thirteen accounts in this volume tell of everyday hauntings in homes and workplace and communication between the living and the dead. Chronicling true events that took place in England and Wales, they open a window onto the way we see place and our relationship with the past.

The Secret Life of God is a kind of spiritual investigation into twenty-first century Britain. It chronicles how, in an age when institutional religion is on the decline, people are finding new ways of believing and belonging, and puts the faces and places to the trend in which people are increasingly describing themselves as 'spiritual but not religious'. Part travelogue, part reportage, the book reveals the communities pioneering a new form of monasticism, the Sufis exploiting the spirituality of sound, the hermits seeking solitude in the everyday and the Druids forging a relationship with nature. Interwoven with a powerful narrative of loss and belonging, it is both a deeply personal book and one which tells a wider story about our evolving relationship with place and meaning.