Böcker utgivna av Eland Publishing

After eight years working in Japan, immersing herself in its language and literature, Lesley Chan Downer set off in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho, Japan's most cherished poet, to explore the country's remote northern provinces. Basho's pilgrimage to find the landscapes that had inspired the great medieval poets gave birth to Japan's most famous travel book, rich in strange imagery and sometimes comic encounters along the road. In this intriguing cross-threading of journeys, perceptions and exquisite haiku, Lesley creates her own funny, loving and honest portrayal of contemporary Japan. As she walks, she finds at one and the same time a drab post-industrial landscape of concrete and cable, but also a land still full of the old enchantments. Nights in thatched highland villages and sake-drenched poetry sessions encourage her to see for herself if any of the legendary hermit-priests still survive in the sacred mountains of the north.

Joe Roberts stayed for five months with the Trivedi family in Bangalore, while traveling all over southern India. In Pondicherry he found Rita, a melancholic divorcee banished to an ashram. He saw the great temple at Madurai, watched the snakeboat races at Arunmala, stayed with Syriac Christians at Cochin and was offered heroin in the Jewish cemetery. Wherever he went he met extraordinary people, but these encounters take second place to his ripening friendship with the Trivedi family, and his exact chronicling of their neighbors. As Major Trivedi warned him 'nothing is as fixed as you think'. Three Quarters of a Footprint has long fascinated readers with its gentle, perceptive humor, chilled occasionally by a shadow of menace, as if the spirit and wit of R K Narayan had been reborn in an Englishman.