Behind The Beautiful Forevers

Emma — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

‘A Mumbai slum understood and imagined as never before in language of intense beauty’ Salman Rushdie ‘If Bollywood ever decides to do its own version of The Wire, this would be it’ Barbara Ehrenreich Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers and construction workers, economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India’s booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal. As Boo gets to know those who dwell in Mumbai’s margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India. ‘A triumph of a book. A beautiful account of the sorrows and joys, anxieties and stamina, in the lives of the precarious and powerless in urban India’ Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics ‘Magnificent…a masterpiece… Quite simply, one of the finest works on contemporary India yet written’ Sunday Telegraph

Secret Lives Of Buildings

Emma — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The plans are drawn up, a site is chosen, foundations are dug: a building comes into being with the expectation that it will stay put and stay for ever. But a building is a capricious thing: it is inhabited and changed, and its existence is a tale of constant and curious transformation. In this radical reimagining of architectural history, Edward Hollis tells the stories of thirteen buildings, beginning with the ‘once upon a time’ when they first appeared, through the years of appropriation, ruin and renovation, and ending with a temporary ‘ever after’. In spell-binding prose, Hollis follows his buildings through time and space to reveal the hidden histories of the Parthenon and the Alhambra, Gloucester Cathedral and Haghia Sofia, Sans Souci and Notre Dame de Paris, Malatesta’s Tempio and Loreto, and explores landmarks of our own time, from Hulme’s legendary crescents to the Berlin Wall and the fibre-glass theme parks of Las Vegas.

Portobello Books Ltd – The Bell Bookshop

Behind The Beautiful Forevers

Secret Lives Of Buildings