Stupor Mundi Books: 5 books

"Your parents know that somebody is spying on them? Why doesn't your father rip down the microphone?" "He's proud of it." "Proud? It's an outrageous intrusion!" "Father says: better spied on than not worth spying on." Jonathan Falla's...

R B Le Page (1920-2006) was one of the founding fathers of sociolinguistics. From an impoverished and unpromising start in east London WW2, and after a dangerous few years flying against submarines during the war, he worked his way through Oxford to become a young lecturer at the new University College...

"Forty-eight occasional pieces ranging from the music of forest rebels to Arabic novels by way of Kenyan trains and the automatic pistols in my mother's attic." Jonathan Falla's life and work has taken him from origins in the Caribbean to disaster relief agencies and children's rights,...

A quietly devastating tale of innocence caught up in civil war, Jonathan Falla's The Morena was shortlisted for the National SHort Story Prize. Other tales here have been widely published and broadcast of BBC Radio, and won a PEN fiction prize. "Glacial and understated, Falla's prose has...

The killing of a mammoth obstructing the tourist routes in the Scottish Highlands, and the death of a Red Brigade terrorist in an attic overlooking the Venetian lagoon. Desperate negotiations with an architect in Iran, and the beating of an aid worker for failing to deliver rain - these are some of...