Canterbury Tales Guesthouse

[Daveo]

More Thoughts From the Pattaya Orphanage by Sean Godsell & Patrick McGeown...

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[Daveo]

Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja: Thailand's Illegal Economy and Public Policy by Pasuk Phongpaichit...

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Gambling, prostitution, drugs, arms trading, oil smuggling, and trafficking in people-these six illegal businesses are large and getting larger in Thailand.

They distort the economy and victimize people.

They are increasingly linked together through networks of protection and organized crime.

They help to fund Thailand's corrosive "money politics" and to sustain corruption in the police.

The authors argue that control of the illegal economy, especially through reform of the police, is vital for the development of a

[Daveo]

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[Daveo]

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing. . . .

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In 1983 cinema audiences flocked to see the latest James Bond movie in which Roger Moore defeats a Soviet general who attempts to launch a nuclear first strike against the West.

Like all Bond movies, audiences believed that the storyline was entirely fictional if not totally crazy.

Little did they know that while they munched on their popcorn, the Soviets were indeed preparing to launch a real nuclear attack on the West.

1983 was a dangerous year. In the United States, President Reagan increased defence spending and launched the 'Star Wars' Strategic Defence Initiative. When a Soviet plane shot down a Korean civilian jet, he described it as 'a crime against humanity'.

Moscow was growing increasingly concerned about America's language and behaviour. Would they attack? The temperature was rising, fast.

By November, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, a life-long KGB man, had his finger on the nuclear button. Had the US made a move, it would have meant global nuclear Armageddon.

It was only the following year that the US - which had never considered a first strike - came to learn just how terrified the Soviet Union was, and just how close to the brink the world had come.

In 1983, Taylor Downing draws on previously unpublished interviews, and over a thousand pages of secret documents that have recently been released by Washington to tell the gripping, astonishing story that was almost the end of the world. Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.

[Daveo]

Untouchable by Jayne Ann Krentz

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A man's quest to find answers for those who are haunted by the past leads him deeper into the shadows in this electrifying novel from the author of Promise Not to Tell. Quinton Zane is back. Jack Lancaster, consultant to the FBI, has always been drawn to the coldest of cold cases, the kind that law enforcement either considers unsolvable or else has chalked up to accidents or suicides.

As a survivor of a fire, he finds himself uniquely compelled by arson cases. His almost preternatural ability to get inside the killer's head has garnered him a reputation in some circles and complicated his personal life.

The more cases Jack solves, the closer he slips into the darkness. His only solace is Winter Meadows, a meditation therapist. After particularly grisly cases, Winter can lead Jack back to peace. But as long as Quinton Zane is alive, Jack will not be at peace for long. Having solidified his position as the power behind the throne of his biological family's hedge fund, Zane sets out to get rid of Anson Salinas's foster sons, starting with Jack.

[Daveo]

In a House of Lies (Inspector Rebus #22) by Ian Rankin. . . .

This book 440 baht Asia books, our price 140 baht @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange - plus the 50% trade in for credit when you have finished with it..

IN A HOUSE OF LIES... Everyone has something to hide A missing private investigator is found, locked in a car hidden deep in the woods. Worse still - both for his family and the police - is that his body was in an area that had already been searched. Everyone has Secrets Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is part of a new inquiry, combing through the mistakes of the original case. There were always suspicions over how the investigation was handled and now - after a decade without answers - it's time for the truth. Nobody is innocent Every officer involved must be questioned, and it seems everyone on the case has something to hide, and everything to lose. But there is one man who knows where the trail may lead - and that it could be the end of him: John Rebus.

[Daveo]

To the Last Man: Spring 1918 by Lyn Macdonald. . .

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As poignant as Niall Fregusson's The Pity of War, as powerful as John Keegan's The First World War, this is an engrossing eyewitness history of World War I.

From the trenches to the battle lines, in bold advances and fighting retreats and courageous stands, this oral chronicle of World War I by award-winning historian Lyn Macdonald brings to life the massive German offensive of Spring 1918 that became the Second Battle of Somme.

As moving as it is monumental, the volume recounts the devastating assault in the words of the men who survived it, from the commanders to the war-weary British Tommies, the eager German foot soldiers, and the as-yet-untested doughboys fresh from the U.S.

Unforgettably, To the Last Man puts a human face on the armies in the field as it gives voice to the soldiers who together held their position against the foe-resisting, as the Allied command had ordered, "to the last round and the last man."

[Daveo]

Sex Death And Enlightenment by Mark Matousek..

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The author, Mark Matousek, writes of his struggle to live an enlightened life in a desacralized and brutal age.

He tells the story of his spiritual awakening, free of religious piety and founded on principles of passion, mystery, sacredness and bliss.

[Daveo]

The Butcher's Son (A Dick Hardesty Mystery #1) by Dorien Grey

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Dick Hardesty is pressed into service when someone starts burning down gay bars all over town and the police chief (nicknamed 'the butcher') shrugs the whole thing off.

Then drag Queens and female impersonators get into the act and Dick is required to sleuth out who is hot and who is not.

[Daveo]

The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (The Civil War #1) by Shelby Foote

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The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 1 begins one of the most remarkable works of history ever fashioned.

All the great battles are here, of course, from Bull Run through Shiloh, the Seven Days Battles, and Antietam, but so are the smaller ones: Ball's Bluff, Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Island Ten, New Orleans, and Monitor versus Merrimack.

The word "narrative" is the key to this extraordinary book's incandescence and its truth.

The story is told entirely from the point of view of the people involved in it.

One learns not only what was happening on all fronts but also how the author discovered it during his years of exhaustive research.

This first volume in Shelby Foote's comprehensive history is a must-listen for anyone interested in one of the bloodiest wars in America's history.

[Daveo]

Gay Sex: A Manual for Men Who Love Men by Jack Hart..

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[Daveo]

Zola: A Biography by Frederick Brown

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Few writers have been - simultaneously - political hero, intellectual master, and literary giant. But Emile Zola (1840-1902) was: his monumental cycle of twenty novels extended the reach of fiction for all subsequent generations; he gave new meaning to the cause of brave progressivism; and his work sparked into life what we think of as the modern intelligentsia.

This magisterial biography of a great but strangely private and unknown man is also a superb history of the social, political, and intellectual world through which Zola traveled so unforgettably.

Fifteen years in the making, Zola draws on the new edition of Zola's letters, with its hundreds of new documents, to offer unprecedented detail and nuance about Zola's life.

[Daveo]

Siren Land by Norman Douglas

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There are two kinds of Englishmen, those who stay at home and those who go abroad.

Douglas was one of the latter.

He was born in 1868, mid-Victorian, and received a classical education. To a lad of spirit and imagination, England was no place to stay.

So he shipped to Italy and there remained, steeped in the land and tradition, 100 years ahead of his time.

In books such as SIREN LAND, he wrote of the timeless things that come to us from antiquity. His books are erudite and humane, rather like a seminar with a favorite professor.

But not dry! Douglas was a confirmed hedonist, and he milked the sensual pleasures for all they were worth. By 1952, the year in which he died he had his fill. Not surprisingly, he killed himself.

A Year in Marrakesh by Peter Mayne

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This brilliantly entertaining, insightful classic account of Marrakesh captures the rhythm and spirit of life in the backways of the Medina in the 1950's.

First published by John Murray as The Alleys of Marrakesh.

Mandingo (Falconhurst #1) by Kyle Onstott.

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Mandingo is a novel written in 1957 by Kyle Onstott.

The book is set in the 1830's in the antebellum South primarily around Falconhurst, a fictional plantation in Alabama owned by the planter Warren Maxwell.

The narrative centers on Maxwell, his son Hammond, and the Mandingo (or Mandinka) slave Ganymede, or Mede.

It is a tale of cruelty toward the blacks of that time, containing vicious fights, poisoning, and violent

[Daveo]

Dean and Me: A Love Story by Jerry Lewis & James Kaplan.....

Traded in @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange -

They were the unlikeliest of pairs — a handsome crooner and a skinny monkey, an Italian from Steubenville, Ohio, and a Jew from Newark, N.J.. Before they teamed up, Dean Martin seemed destined for a mediocre career as a nightclub singer, and Jerry Lewis was dressing up as Carmen Miranda and miming records on stage. But the moment they got together, something clicked—something miraculous—and audiences saw it at once. Before long, they were as big as Elvis or the Beatles would be after them, creating hysteria wherever they went and grabbing an unprecedented hold over every entertainment outlet of the era: radio, television, movies, stage shows, and nightclubs. Martin and Lewis were a national craze, an American institution. The millions (and the women) flowed in, seemingly without end—and then, on July 24, 1956, ten years from the day when the two men joined forces, it all ended. After that traumatic day, the two wouldn’t speak again for twenty years. And while both went on to forge triumphant individual careers—Martin as a movie and television star, recording artist, and nightclub luminary (and charter member of the Rat Pack); Lewis as the groundbreaking writer, producer, director, and star of a series of hugely successful movie comedies—their parting left a hole in the national psyche, as well as in each man’s heart. In a memoir by turns moving, tragic, and hilarious, Jerry Lewis recounts with crystal clarity every step of a fifty-year friendship, from the springtime, 1945 afternoon when the two vibrant young performers destined to conquer the world together met on Broadway and Fifty-fourth Street, to their tragic final encounter in the 1990s, when Lewis and his wife ran into Dean Martin, a broken and haunted old man. In Dean and Me, Jerry Lewis makes a convincing case for Dean Martin as one of the great — and most underrated — comic talents of our era. But what comes across most powerfully in this definitive memoir is the depth of love Lewis felt, and still feels, for his partner, and which his partner felt for him: truly a love to last for all time.

[Daveo]

Morning Star (The First-Born of Egypt #1) by Simon Raven

Both in stock @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange -

This first volume in Simon Raven’s ‘First Born of Egypt’ saga opens with the christening of the Marquess Cantaloupes son and heir, Sarum of Old Sarum. The ceremony, attended by the godparents and the real father, Fielding Gray, is not without drama. The christening introduces a bizarre cast of eccentric characters and complicated relationships. In Morning Star we meet the brilliant but troublesome teenager Marius Stern. Marius’ increasingly outrageous behaviour has him constantly on the verge of expulsion from prep school. When his parents are kidnapped, apparently without reason, events take a turn for the worse.

Face Of The Waters (The First-Born of Egypt #2) by Simon Raven

This is the second volume of Simon Raven’s ‘First Born of Egypt’ series. Marius Stern, the wayward son of Gregory Stern, has survived earlier escapades and is safely back at prep school, assisted by his father’s generous contribution to the school’s new shooting range. Fielding Gray and Jeremy Morrison are returning home via Venice, where they encounter the friar, Piero, an ex-male whore and a figure from a shared but distant past.

Back in England, at the Wiltshire family home, Lord Cantaloupe is restless. He finds his calm disturbed by events: the arrival of Piero; Jeremy’s father’s threat to saddle his son with the responsibility of the family estate; and the dramatic resistance of Gregory Stern to attempted blackmail.

[Daveo]

The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk / Palace of Desire / Sugar Street (The Cairo Trilogy #1-3) by Naguib Mahfouz

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Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time.

The Nobel Prize-winning writer's masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain's occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century. The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence.

Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons, the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal.

Al-Sayyid Ahmad rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in Palace of Desire, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920's.

Sugar Street brings Mahfouz’s vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the aging patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician. Throughout the trilogy, the family's trials mirror those of their turbulent country during the years spanning the two World Wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries.

Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller.

[Daveo]

Snow by Orhan Pamuk...

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A spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings, for love, art, power, and God, set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order; by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings–for love, art, power, and God–set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order. Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their headscarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity, a frozen sea these many years - leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides. No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten.

As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness. Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties

[Daveo]

Auden by Richard Davenport-Hines..

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A masterful biography of one of the greatest English poets and most compelling literary figures of the 20th century, Auden is the first to take the full measure of the poet's achievements, his insatiable thirst for experience, his navigation between the needs of discipline and the lure of his addictions and lusts. of photos.

[Daveo]

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

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Cry, the Beloved Country, the most famous and important novel in South Africa’s history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948.

Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty. Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, “We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country the statesman, the poet and the novelist meet in a unique harmony.” Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.

[Daveo]

The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans

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From his marriage to Ali McGraw, his cocaine bust, the accusations of murder, the friendships with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, to his legendary court case and bust up with Francis Ford Coppola, this is the tell-all autobiography from Robert Evans, the legendary Hollywood producer (The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown) who's lived the Hollywood dream.

[Daveo]

The Man Who Would Be King: The Life of Philippe d'Orleans, Regent of France by Christine Pevitt..

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Many consider Philippe to be France's equivalent to Richard III: a royal regent who would be accused of debauchery, treason, incest, and murder.

Philippe threw Voltaire in prison and coveted the throne for himself.

Once an accomplished soldier and artist, Philippe was a middle-aged philanderer and slave to pleasure in 1715, when his uncle died and Philippe's five-year-old cousin became King Louis XV.

While much of his reputation may be valid, Philippe d'Orleans was a mass of contradictions who tried valiantly to improve conditions in a country long plagued by death and disaster.

[Daveo]

Boys in Shorts by Chris Kent..& many others***

Gay interest in our Erotica section @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Here's just a few traded in recently

[Daveo]

London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins,

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Also known as Dulcimer Street - Norman Collins London Belongs to Me is a Dickensian romp through working-class London on the eve of the Second World War. It is 1938 and the prospect of war hangs over every London inhabitant.

But the city simply doesn't stop. Everywhere people continue to work, drink, fall in love, fight and struggle to get on in life.

At the lodging-house at No.10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, the buttoned-up clerk Mr Josser returns home with the clock he has received as a retirement gift.

The other residents include the faded actress Connie; tinned food-loving Mr Puddy; widowed landlady Mrs Vizzard (whose head is turned by her new lodger, a self-styled 'Professor of Spiritualism'); and flashy young mechanic Percy Boon, whose foray into stolen cars descends into something much, much worse... Norman Collins (1907-1982) was a British writer, and later a radio and television executive, who was responsible for creating Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4, and became one of the major figures behind the establishment of the Independent Television (ITV) network in the UK. In all Norman Collins wrote 16 novels and two plays, including London Belongs to Me (1945), The Governor's Lady (1968) and The Husband's Story (1978). If you enjoyed London Belongs to Me, you might like Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'One of the great city novels: a sprawling celebration of the comedy, the savagery, the eccentricity and the quiet heroism at the heart of ordinary London life' Sarah Waters, author of The Night Watch

[Daveo]

To Lose a Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne. . .

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During six weeks in 1940, Hitler's blitzkrieg shattered the redoubtable Maginot Line and, shortly thereafter, the French army.

No historian has written a more definitive chronicle of that disaster than Alistair Horne, or one so emotionally gripping. Moving with cinematic swiftness from the battlefield to the Reichstag and the Palais de l'...lysée, To Lose a Battle overspills the confines of traditional military history to become a portrait of the French national soul in its darkest night.

[Daveo]

A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

(A Dance to the Music of Time #1-4) by Anthony Powell..

Full set all 4 books @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I.

Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures.

These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses. Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widmerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world.

Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars.