Join Chalke Authors. Win Tickets To Meet Bestselling Author William Dalrymple.
Bestselling Travel Writer William Dalrymple will be appearing at the following event on the evening of July 15th at Waterstone's High Street Kensington. 7.00 Start.
Chalke Authors have 10 pairs of complimentary tickets to giveaway for this event. To win simply sign up to Chalke Authors on Facebook and email jemimaforrester.chalke@hotmail.com to enter raffle for tickets. You will also be automatically entered to win a copy of William's new paperback, Nine Lives. Winners will be contacted by July 5th.
India - Past & Present.
Anthony Sattin, critically acclaimed author of Winter On The Nile, interviews William Dalrymple about his new book, Nine Lives - and his previous travels. Join the discussion yourself about India, past and present, and ask questions.
£3 per ticket.
To reserve a ticket please call shop on 02079378432
Or email manager@kensington.waterstones.com
Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple.
In this title, a Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her middle-class family in Calcutta, and her job in a jute factory, only to find unexpected love and fulfilment living as a Tantric skull feeder in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes, for two months of the year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as a deity; then, at the end of February each year, he returns to prison. An illiterate goet herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4,000-line sacred epic that he, virtually alone, still knows by heart. A devadasi - or temple prostitute - initially resists her own initiation into sex work, yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling. Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerising, and told with an almost biblical simplicity, William Dalrymple's first travel book in over a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the region's rapid change. A distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions, "Nine Lives" is a modern Indian Canterbury Tales.
Winter On The Nile, by Anthony Sattin.
In the winter of 1849, Florence Nightingale was an unknown 29-year-old - beautiful, well-born and deeply unhappy. After clashing with her parents over her refusal to marry, she had been offered a lifeline by family friends who suggested a trip to Egypt, a country which she had always longed to visit. This book follows her journey along the Nile: a romantic adventure, but also a deeply spiritual one. It was during the trip that she found emotional recovery, the inspiration to resist parental pressure and the resolve to pursue her dream of a career in nursing. By an extraordinary coincidence, taking the same boat from Alexandria was an unpublished French writer, Gustave Flaubert. Like Nightingale, he was at the crossroads in his life that was to lead to future acclaim and literary triumph. As it did for her, Egypt for him represented escape and freedom as well as inspiration. But as a wealthy young man travelling with male friends, he had access to an altogether different Egypt: where Nightingale sought out temples and dispensaries, Flaubert visited brothels and harems. Both of them were entranced, moved and liberated by the wonders of the Nile. As privileged early travellers, they saw an ancient landscape unchanged for centuries, and visited monuments still familiar to tourists today. And both wrote magnificently about the sights they saw. This is a book about a key moment in the life of Florence Nightingale, a tantalising portrait of a young woman on the brink of international fame. But it also wonderfully counterpoints her journey with that of a future French literary genius, and it provides fascinating insight into the early days of travel to one of the greatest tourist destinations on the planet.