The captivating new drama of family secrets and second chances, from Sunday Times bestselling author Erica James It's the autumn of 1962 in the idyllic Suffolk village of Melstead St Mary. Evelyn Devereux's husband Kit is planning their 20th wedding anniversary party. But as they prepare to celebrate, Evelyn receives an anonymous letter that threatens to unravel the secrets she's kept hidden for many years - secrets that reach back to the war and her days at Bletchley Park. Evelyn's sister-in-law, Hope, has brought joy to countless children with her bestselling books, but despite having a loving husband and caring family, happiness has never come easily to her. Then in an instant her fragile world is turned upside down when she too receives an anonymous letter. Across the village, up at Melstead Hall, Julia Devereux has married into a life beyond anything she could have dreamt of, not realising until it's too late that it comes with a heavy price. Meanwhile, in the sun-baked desert of Palm Springs, Romily Devereux-Temple, crime-writer and former ATA pilot, is homesick for her beloved Island House, where she's saved the day more times than she can count. On her return home, and shocked to learn what has been going on in her absence, she finds herself reluctantly confronting a secret she's kept hidden for a very long time. Once again Romily is challenged to save the day and hold the family together. Can she do it, and maybe seize some happiness for herself at the same time? From the gorgeous Suffolk countryside to the glamorous resort of Palm Springs, let Erica James sweep you away... *** Readers are enchanted by Erica's storytelling... 'A glorious summer story which sizzles with passion: idyllic location, compelling characters and lives so interwoven that their secrets have the power to change everything. I wanted it to go on forever' Cathy Bramley 'Joyously readable' Woman & Home 'The setting is almost a character in itself in this evocative tale of tears and laughter' Woman Magazine 'Erica James offers glorious escapism set in a house to die for' Sunday Express Magazine 'Full of warmth and appeal' Good Housekeeping 'A captivating read: beautifully written and heartrendingly sad' Daily Telegraph 'Absorbing and uplifting' My Weekly

Step into the magic of Lantern Square... A delightfully heartwarming story, perfect for fans of Holly Hepburn and Cathy Bramley. The Little Cottage in Lantern Square is Helen Rolfe's four Lantern Square novellas collected together for the first time. Hannah went from high flyer in the city to business owner and has never looked back. In the cosy Cotswold village of Butterbury she runs Tied up with String, sending handmade gifts and care packages across the miles, as well as delivering them to people she thinks need them the most. But when her ex best-friend Georgia turns up and wants in on the action, will Hannah be willing to forgive and forget? With her business in jeopardy she needs to maintain the reputation she's established, and discover who she can trust... Meanwhile, a mysterious care package lands on her own doorstep at Lantern Cottage. Who is trying to win her heart - and will she ever be willing to give it away? *The Little Cottage in Lantern Square is the collected Lantern Square novellas. If you have read and enjoyed the novellas, then you have already enjoyed The Little Cottage in Lantern Square. For more novellas from Helen Rolfe, try her Little Cafe at the End of the Pier series* ***

At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture--subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through analyses of everyday and ceremonial social practices, Piot illustrates the intertwining of modernity with tradition and of the local with the national and global. In a striking example of the appropriation of tradition by the state, Togo's Kabre president regularly flies to the region in his helicopter to witness male initiation ceremonies.
Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, "Remotely Global" aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.

"Underworlds" is a lively account of organized crime and the world of marginal groups in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Netherlands.

Rural banditry has often been associated with mountainous, poverty-stricken areas located at the peripheries of the European continent or on the borders between states. This book is about bands operating in the countryside of one of the most densely populated, economically developed, and pacified European states. It examines the nature of these criminal bands and the way they changed over time, probing the links between warfare, poverty, immigration, social exclusion, stigmatization, and involvement in rural organized crime.

At the same time "Underworlds" presents an historical anthropology of marginal groups in the Dutch Republic. Investigating the enormous cultural diversity of organized crime and the prominent role of ethnic minorities (East Europeans, Jews and Gypsies), Egmond establishes the existence of a variety of 'underworlds' rather than of a single 'criminal organization'.

Drawing extensively on criminal archives, the author reconstructs the ways of life and activities of people whose existence has remained largely hidden behind the conventional accounts of Dutch society.

A critical exploration of how modernity and progress were imposed on the people and land of rural South Dakota The Rosebud Country, comprising four counties in rural South Dakota, was first established as the Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1889 to settle the Sicangu Lakota. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, white homesteaders arrived in the area and became the majority population. Today, the population of Rosebud Country is nearly evenly divided between Indians and whites. In Power and Progress on the Prairie, Thomas Biolsi traces how a variety of governmental actors, including public officials, bureaucrats, and experts in civil society, invented and applied ideas about modernity and progress to the people and the land. Through a series of case studies-programs to settle "surplus" Indian lands, to "civilize" the Indians, to "modernize" white farmers, to find strategic sites for nuclear missile silos, and to extend voting rights to Lakota people-Biolsi examines how these various "problems" came into focus for government experts and how remedies were devised and implemented. Drawing on theories of governmentality derived from Michel Foucault, Biolsi challenges the idea that the problems identified by state agents and the solutions they implemented were inevitable or rational. Rather, through fine-grained analysis of the impact of these programs on both the Lakota and white residents, he reveals that their underlying logic was too often arbitrary and devastating.

Life outside our nation's big cities comprises a remarkably rich aspect of America-culturally, historically, and physically. Because of the way we move through the country, however-on roads built for maximum expediency-most of us are rarely if ever exposed to these small communities, a trend that is moving these towns dangerously far off the maps of commerce and public consciousness. In Easy On, Easy Off, Jack Williams takes to the roads of the interstate highway system to explore America's small towns, bringing back diverse examples of both beautiful and neglected places that illustrate how shifts in modern transportation have influenced urban form. Most of these communities are little known beyond their discrete regions, yet their struggles to prosper are universal. Mill towns, county-seat court squares, villages of the Great Plains, mining towns, and California's forgotten Chinese settlements all share similar fates-overshadowed by interstate off-ramp towns and bypassed by high-speed traffic. Employing more than 150 historic maps and images, unique drawings, and contemporary photographs, Williams convincingly argues that irreversible changes have overtaken the landscapes of small-town America, with each community's economic and social vitality slowly shifting away to other commercial places that attach to our highway interchanges and extrude into strip malls. A tale of success perhaps for the highway system, the more urgent story relayed in Easy On, Easy Off is of the loss of the complex fabric of thousands of small towns that once defined this nation.

The Poison in the Gift is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving in a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of ritual centrality, Raheja shows that the position of the dominant landholding caste in the village is grounded in a central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis Dumont in his 1966 book, Homo Hierarchicus, in which he proposed a disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the purity of the Brahman priest and the temporal power of the dominant caste or the king.

The rapidly changing nature of life in Canadian rural communities is more than a simple response to economic conditions. People living in rural places are part of a new social agenda characterized by the transformation of livelihoods, landscapes, and social relations, changes that invite us to reconsider the meanings of community, culture, and citizenship. This volume presents the work of researchers from a variety of fields who explore social transformation in rural settlements across the country. The essays collectively generate a nuanced portrait of how local forms of action, adaptation, identity, and imagination are reshaping Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in rural Canada.

Suburbanization, affordable housing, mass transportation, loss of fertile lands -- these are modern problems, yet they are not new. Thomas Adams grappled with these same issues nearly a century ago, when he wrote Rural Planning and Development, a book that quickly became a touchstone for planners and planning in Canada. Reprinted for the first time and updated with commentaries by leading Canadian planners, this book highlights Adams' influence on the planning profession and the continued relevance of his comprehensive vision for planning -- to move beyond the demands of the moment to embrace long-term strategies for building stronger rural communities.

Over the last forty years, the landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. It is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech and the so-called `creative class'. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America's Hinterland, populated by towering grain-threshing machines and hunched farmworkers, where labourers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and `fulfilment centres'. Driven by an ever-expanding crisis, America's class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty and production. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail, and tells the intimate story of a life lived within America's hinterland

This case study is based on a consequent implementing of the Grounded Theory Approach. It takes a close look at rural women's life worlds, not only capturing them as agents in the ongoing process of social and political change, but also revealing concepts and motivations leading their agency. It clearly shows rural women in the Northwest Province of Cameroon involved in mass protests fighting for more democracy, and at the same time struggling to improve their participation in all fields of social action, from family level to the economic sphere and the political arena of local government.

This book analyzes the functions, content, methods, findings, and impacts of social and cultural research carried out by the worldwide network of 16 International Agricultural Research Centers of the CGIAR(Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). Its two main parts - "insiders" and "outsiders" - bring together the perspectives of over 50 eminent scholars and social researchers from 30 countries, working within the Centers or within outside academic and development institutions. The authors examine critically the priorities, strengths, and weaknesses of research on the socio-structural, behavioral, cultural, and institutional variables of developing agriculture, forestry, livestock, and fisheries. The studies focus on farmers' values, needs and knowledge, their patterns of social organization, issues of food security, natural resource management and poverty reduction. Alternative models of multidisciplinary research, reuniting biological, natural, economic and social sciences are scrutinized in the light of experience and results, with emphasis on the nature of social science research as a source of international public goods and a key contributor to induced development.

"The author has managed to combine successfully the professional approach of an anthropologist with that of a novelist to the description of an Indian village community...Srinivas has made a virtue out of the misfortune of losing all his field notes: The Remembered Village is a piece of art which is bound to become a classic of Indian ethnography." (T. Scarlett Epstein, Times Higher Education Supplement). "The real virtue of this most recent contribution by Dr. Srinivas is the consistently human, humane, and humanistic tone oft he observations and of the narration; the simple, straightforward style in which it is written; and the richness of anecdotal materials...He writes modestly as a wise and knowledgeable man. He restores faith in the best tradition of ethnography. Without being popular, in the pejorative sense, it is a book any uninitiated reader can read with pleasure and enlightenment." (Cora Du Bois, Asian Student). "Few accounts of village life give one the sense of coming to know, of vicariously sharing in, the lives of real villagers that this book conveys...The work is holistic in the best anthropological manner; the principal aspects of Rampura life are lucidly sketched and the interrelations among them are cogently considered. ..our collective knowledge and its practical relevance become enhanced." (David G. Mandelbaum, Economic and Political Weekly). "[Srinivas] has described and analyzed life in Rampura in the late 1940s with charm and insight. His book is enjoyable as well as illuminating...In addition to the rich detail of village life and of a number of individual villagers, Srinivas gives us valuable insights into the nature of ethnographic research. He relates how he came to study this particular village. He tells us how he got established in the village, and describes vividly his living quarters...He describes, at various places throughout the book, his reactions to the villagers and his perceptions of their reactions to him. He freely admits his own negative reactions to certain things and certain behavior. He discusses the factors that could and did bias his research...illuminate[s] both the problems and the rewards of the ethnographer...must reading." (Robert H. Lauer, Sociology: Reviews of New Books).

Rural families in developing countries make a living by engaging in diverse activities. These range from farming, to rural trade, to migration to distant cities and even abroad. This book explores the implications of rural livelihood diversity for key topics in development studies and for poverty reduction policies. The livelihoods approach is gaining momentum, and this is the first book to set it out in detail.

Private investigator Kate Weller knows her co-workers are in serious trouble when she is unable to reach them in the third enthralling Marked for Retribution mystery. Kate Weller's boss, Nate Price, has some exciting news: Julian Frazier, a friend of one of the agency's wealthy clients, has invited the Nate Price Investigations team and their partners on a trip of a lifetime to his home on Elysian Island, an exclusive retreat off the Georgian coast. But there's a catch. Frazier has written his own murder mystery script, and the PIs must work out whodunnit. As they're about to discover, though, the murder Frazier wants them to solve is a real cold case, and there's a killer twist that isn't in the script . . . Unable to reach Elysian Island and her co-workers, Kate is sure that someone wants her to stay away. Can she stop a ruthless killer and uncover the truth behind a deadly game?

The astonishing poetry debut exploring hidden histories, mythical landscapes and self-discovery in the face of limits on women's bodily autonomy In 2017, the presence of a mass grave was confirmed in a disused sewage system in Tuam, County Galway. In it were the bodies of infants - wards of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, where from 1925 to 1961 the children of unmarried women were sent to live their lives in the care of nuns. Their deaths were the result of a conservative culture which, under the influence of the Church, took a prurient interest in women's private lives and bodies. In The Speculations of Country People, her hauntingly lyrical debut collection, Majella Kelly reckons with that legacy. She traces the journeys of women in our own day, from controlling relationships to sexual reawakening and new happiness. The speculations of the title are in part those of gossip, the chatter of small communities everywhere; but they are also those of a local, very Irish mythos, in which pagan and Christian - and truth and legend - blend and blur. Here, then, are hares and selkies, a seductive 'master otter' of 'fabulous elegance' who might carry a woman away in the night; here is the last man on Omey Island; here a retired stuntman, dragging his bed of rusty nails along the beach. And here - quiet, against the beauty and loneliness of the Connemara landscape - are the little bones that wash up on shores or stick from the earth to speak of what has been.

Can the magic of Christmas and the community of Thorndale bring two lost souls together in love?Olivia doesn't have time for Christmas or for romance - she's got a demanding career and has been burned before when it comes to love. This year, she's spending the festive season in her dad's old house, packing it up now that he's moved out. Her dad failed to mention she wouldn't be spending her time there alone... The last thing Olivia expects is for her surprise guest to be the very man who literally ran from her after an evening of mutual flirtation. But Tom has nowhere else to go and Olivia is determined to forget the disappointment she felt at his abandonment and instead help him find his way again. As heavy snow keeps them inside the cottage, will their enforced confinement spark romance once again - or will it push them further apart? The perfect festive romance to curl up with, for fans of Victoria Walters and Trisha Ashley. Praise for A Country Village Christmas 'Warm and comforting and realistic and heartwarming and funny. It's got everything a real family Christmas should have.' Reader review 'The writing evokes a real sense of community, with friendship and family at the heart, and the main characters are well drawn. I could easily imagine this book being made into a "feel good" movie. Perfect if you're looking for an uplifting light read - a cosy novel with a seasonal and romantic theme.' Reader review 'This was my first visit to Thorndale and after enjoying this peep into the village I can't wait to explore more books by this author. It's a book you will want to devour in one sitting, snuggled up with a hot chocolate.' Reader review 'I absolutely loved this beautiful, cosy, heartwarming read that was so much more than just a Christmas book. This was the perfect escapism read.' Reader review

In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath's conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath's only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay's accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath's priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.

For the Public Good: Women, Equity and Health in Rural India details the role of the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), a groundbreaking, internationally recognized primary health care model that uses local solutions to solve intractable global health problems. Emphasizing equity and community participation, this grassroots approach recruits local women to be educated as village-based health workers. In turn, women village health workers collaborate to overcome the dominant double prejudices in local villages-caste and gender inequality. In one generation, village health workers have progressed from child brides and sequestered wives to knowledgeable health practitioners, valued teachers, and community leaders. Through collective efforts, CRHP has reduced infant and maternal mortality, eliminated some endemic health problems, and advanced economic well-being in villages with women's cooperative lending groups. For the Public Good describes how the recognition and elimination of embedded inequalities, in this case caste discrimination, gender subordination, and class injustice, promotes health and well-being and collaboratively establishes the public good.

Eerie and menacing, timely and moving, Impossible Causes is an unputdownable novel that examines the consequences of silence kept at young women's expense. 'A tightly told and powerful story of sins, lies and secrets long held' i 'This highly atmospheric tale is both thrilling and poignant' Heat For seven months of the year, the remote island of Lark is fogbound, cut off completely from the mainland. The arrival of three strangers is the cause of much speculation: the first is a charismatic young teacher - the only male teacher on the island - the other two, a mother and her teenage daughter, seeking a place to hide from unspeakable tragedy. What have they come to escape? What will they find waiting for them on Lark? And whose body will soon be found lying in the island's stone circle?

'Magnificent ... this book is unlikely to be surpassed' Telegraph This is the first major history of the Himalaya: an epic story of peoples, cultures and adventures among the world's highest mountains. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 DUFF COOPER PRIZE An epic story of peoples, cultures and adventures among the world's highest mountains: here Jesuit missionaries exchanged technologies with Tibetan Lamas, Mongol Khans employed Nepali craftsmen, Armenian merchants exchanged musk and gold with Mughals. Featuring scholars and tyrants, bandits and CIA agents, go-betweens and revolutionaries, Himalaya is a panoramic, character-driven history on the grandest but also the most human scale, by far the most comprehensive yet written, encompassing geology and genetics, botany and art, and bursting with stories of courage and resourcefulness. 'Magisterial' The Times 'His observations are sharp...his writing glows' New York Review of Books SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOARDMAN TASKER AWARD FOR MOUNTAIN LITERATURE

This volume combines two classic works of anthropology. "The Little Community" draws on the author's own notable studies of the villages of Tepoztlan and Chan Kom to explore the means by which scientists try to understand human communities. It contains, wrote Margaret Mead, "the essence of Robert Redfield's multifaceted contributions to the place of community studies in social science." "Peasant Society and Culture "outlines a speculative foundation for the emergence of anthropology from the study of isolated primitive tribes.

Bill 6, the government of Alberta's contentious farm workers' safety legislation, sparked public debate as no other legislation has done in recent years. The Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act provides a right to work safely and a compensation system for those killed or injured at work, similar to other provinces. In nine essays, contributors to Farm Workers in Western Canada place this legislation in context. They look at the origins, work conditions, and precarious lives of farm workers in terms of larger historical forces such as colonialism, land rights, and racism. They also examine how the rights and privileges of farm workers, including seasonal and temporary foreign workers, conflict with those of their employers, and reveal the barriers many face by being excluded from most statutory employment laws, sometimes in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Contributors: Gianna Argento, Bob Barnetson, Michael J. Broadway, Jill Bucklaschuk, Delna Contractor, Darlene A. Dunlop, Brynna Hambly (Takasugi), Zane Hamm, Paul Kennett, Jennifer Koshan, C.F. Andrew Lau, J. Graham Martinelli, Shirley A. McDonald, Robin C. McIntyre, Nelson Medeiros, Kerry Preibisch, Heidi Rolfe, Patricia Tomic, Ricardo Trumper, and Kay Elizabeth Turner.

Rural communities, often the first indicators of economic downturns, play an important role in planning for development and sustainability. Increasingly, these communities are compelled to reimagine the paths that lead not only to economic success, but also to the cultural, social, environmental, and institutional pillars of sustainability. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, there are many examples of such innovation and creativity, and many communities that seek out new ways to build the collaboration, capacity, and autonomy necessary to survive and flourish. Contributors: Don Alexander, Kirstine Baccar, Michael Barr, Mary A. Beckie, Moira J. Calder, Meredith Carter, Yolande E. Chan, Sean Connelly, Jon Corbett, Anthony Davis, Jeff A. Dixon, David J.A. Douglas, Roger Epp, Kelly Green, Lars K. Hallstrom, Greg Halseth, Casey Hamilton, Karen Houle, Glen T. Hvenegaard, Melanie Irvine, Bernie Jones, Robert Keenan, Rhonda Koster, Ryan Lane, Sean Markey, Shelly McMann, L. Jane McMillan, Morgan E. Moffitt, Karen Morrison, Karsten Mundel, Craig Pollett, Kerry Prosper, Mark Roseland, Laura Ryser, Claire Sanders, Jennifer Sumner, Kelly Vodden, Marc von der Gonna, Shayne Wright.