This fast-moving story takes the reader rapidly along dark paths of sinister events in Le Sentier, the heart of Paris's rag trade. One spring morning a Thai girl is found dead in a fashion workshop. Another unlucky prostitute, or something more sinister? A club is uncovered where people secretly get filmed having sex - including some very distinguished men. This is the seedy underworld of Paris - the traffic in heroin, illegal immigrants without work permits, police officers' secret lives. A Turkish man - a police informer and leader of exploited immigrants rag-trader workers - is also Police Inspector Danquin's lover. This is a gripping morality tale of twentieth-century Paris. Dominique Manotti teaches nineteenth-century Economic History. "Rough Trade", her first novel, was awarded the top prize for the best thriller of the year by the French Crime Writers Association.

This selection of Margaret Crosland's poetry shows her to be worthy of a place among that small circle of English women poets of unassertive but authentic accomplishment--poets like Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ruth Pitter, and Anne Ridler--and like them she has her own quietly distinctive voice. Her poetry is honest, unobtrusively learned, and unpretentious. The title of this book comes from the author's observation that life consists of little else: we meet people, places, jobs, ideas, but they are rarely there forever, there is always a parting, or at least a development in some way. This new collection contains both old favorites, revised for this volume, and new poems.