The sewers of Bucharest, Romania, Christmas 1989. Vlad and other Securitate secret police comrades fan out across a city about to fall to counter-revolution. The show trial and execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu are broadcast on television. Vlad, raised as an assassin in a Securitate orphanage in Targoviste, home of Vlad the Impaler, vows to avenge the death of his adoptive ‘parents’ in that very town. Moving from safe-house to safe-house, with help from remnants of the regime, he begins to pick off those involved in the murders. Vlad wanders around the new Romania, observing the turning of coats, the miners’ rampages, meeting other post-communist undead. As European integration and a ‘fully functioning market economy’ beckon, he carves, quite literally, a lucrative and grisly niche. Love and fatherhood remain a possibility. But Vlad, like the stray dogs and street walkers he frequents, knows that life is becoming increasingly dangerous. As one victim exclaims: ‘God does not love the workers!’.

Tropicality is a centuries-old Western discourse that treats otherness and the exotic in binary - 'us' and 'them' - terms. It has long been implicated in empire and its anxieties over difference. However, little attention has been paid to its twentieth-century genealogy. This book explores this neglected history through the work of Pierre Gourou, one of the century's foremost purveyors of what anti-colonial writer Aime Cesaire dubbed tropicalite. It explores how Gourou's interpretations of 'the nature' of the tropical world, and its innate difference from the temperate world, were built on the shifting sands of twentieth-century history - empire and freedom, modernity and disenchantment, war and revolution, culture and civilisation, and race and development. The book addresses key questions about the location and power of knowledge by focusing on Gourou's cultivation of the tropics as a romanticised, networked and affective domain. The book probes what Cesaire described as Gourou's 'impure and worldly geography' as a way of opening up interdisciplinary questions of geography, ontology, epistemology, experience and materiality. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students within historical geography, history, postcolonial studies, cultural studies and international relations.

ucharest, before and during World War II, where Bernard Davidescou lives with his parents and his older brother on Triumph Street, in the middle of a courtyard block inhabited by a dozen Jewish families and two Christian ones. When Romania, under General Ion Antonescu's dictatorship, allies itself with Hitler and invades the USSR, the Jews in Bucharest face the threat of being sent to the Nazi extermination camps, after having survived the terror of the fascist Iron Guard. However, each Sunday morning, young Bernard, age twelve, passionate about politics and history, amazes the adults in the courtyard, Jews and Christians alike, with his analysis of the political situation in Romania and the development of the war on all fronts. 'Triumph Street, Bucharest' is the story of this young boy and his dreams and torments during this dark period of human history, while also chronicling a family in crisis, the discovery of sexuality and first loves, and the distraction offered by the cinema, religious searching and idealistic aspirations for a better world.

Tropicality is a centuries-old Western discourse that treats otherness and the exotic in binary - 'us' and 'them' - terms. It has long been implicated in empire and its anxieties over difference. However, little attention has been paid to its twentieth-century genealogy. This book explores this neglected history through the work of Pierre Gourou, one of the century's foremost purveyors of what anti-colonial writer Aime Cesaire dubbed tropicalite. It explores how Gourou's interpretations of 'the nature' of the tropical world, and its innate difference from the temperate world, were built on the shifting sands of twentieth-century history - empire and freedom, modernity and disenchantment, war and revolution, culture and civilisation, and race and development. The book addresses key questions about the location and power of knowledge by focusing on Gourou's cultivation of the tropics as a romanticised, networked and affective domain. The book probes what Cesaire described as Gourou's 'impure and worldly geography' as a way of opening up interdisciplinary questions of geography, ontology, epistemology, experience and materiality. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students within historical geography, history, postcolonial studies, cultural studies and international relations.

A worldwide phenomenon and the most important French novelist since Camus, Michel Houellebecq now delivers his magnum opus-a tale of our present circumstances told from the future, when humanity as we know it has vanished.
Surprisingly poignant, philosophically compelling, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, "The Possibility of an Island "is at once an indictment, an elegy, and a celebration of everything we have and are at risk of losing. It is a masterpiece from one of the world's most innovative writers.