A deeply reported account of life inside Burma in the months following the disastrous Cyclone Nargis and an analysis of the brutal totalitarian regime that clings to power in the devastated nation.
On May 2, 2008, an enormous tropical cyclone made landfall in Burma, wreaking untold havoc and leaving an official toll of 138,300 dead and missing. In the days that followed, the sheer scale of the disaster became apparent as information began to seep out from the hard-hit delta area. But the Burmese regime, in an unfathomable decision of near-genocidal proportions, provided little relief to its suffering population and blocked international aid from entering the country. Hundreds of thousands of Burmese citizens lacked food, drinking water, and basic shelter, but the xenophobic generals who rule the country refused emergency help.
Emma Larkin, who has been traveling to and secretly reporting on Burma for years, managed to arrange for a tourist visa in those frenzied days and arrived hoping to help. It was impossible for anyone to gauge just how much devastation the cyclone had left in its wake; by all accounts, including the regime's, it was a catastrophe of epic proportions. In "Everything Is Broken," Emma Larkin chronicles the chaotic days and months that followed the storm, revealing the secretive politics of Burma's military dictatorship and the bizarre combination of vicious military force, religion, and mysticism that defined its unthinkable response to this horrific event.
The Burmese regime hid the full extent of the storm's devastation from the rest of the world, but the terrible consequences for Burma and its citizens continue to play out months after the headlines have faded from newspapers around the world. In "Everything Is Broken," Larkin-whose deep knowledge of the Burmese people has afforded her unprecedented access and a rare understanding of life under Burmese oppression-provides a singular portrait of the regime responsible for compounding the tragedy and examines the historical, religious, and superstitious setting that created Burma's tenacious and brutal dictatorship. Writing under an assumed name, Larkin delivers the heretofore untold story of a disaster that stunned the world, unveiling as she does so the motivations of the impenetrable generals who govern this troubled nation.

'Endearing... enlightening... an affecting and suspenseful portrait of contemporary Bangkok' Literary Review 'Emma Larkin richly and vividly brings her characters to life... a captivating tour de force' Alaa Al Aswany An overlooked patch of jungle behind a Bangkok city slum resonates with the hopes, dreams and fears of the local community. Those who are drawn to the plot of land - among them a homeless revolutionary, an ambitious property developer, and a lonely expat housewife - believe they can find opportunity or redemption there. But the slum-dwelling spirits who guard its secrets have other plans. With a rich cast of characters that spans Bangkok's multi-layered society, Comrade Aeon's Field Guide to Bangkok is a masterful, captivating debut, and a vivid portrayal of a forgetful city awakening to its past.

In one of the most intrepid travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma, using as a compass the life and work of George Orwell, whom many of Burma's underground teahouse intellectuals call simply ?the Prophet.? In stirring prose, she provides a powerful reckoning with one of the world's least free countries. "Finding George Orwell in Burma" is a brave and revelatory reconnaissance of modern Burma, one of the world's grimmest and most shuttered police states, where the term ?Orwellian? aptly describes the life endured by the country's people. BACKCOVER: ?A truer picture of authoritarianism than anyone has written since, perhaps, Orwell himself.?
"?Mother Jones"
?Mournful, meditative, appealingly idiosyncratic . . . an exercise in literary detection but also a political travelogue.?
"?The New York Times"
?Combining literary criticism with solid field reporting, Larkin] captures the country at its best and, more often, its worst.?
"?San Francisco Chronicle"
? A] sobering, journalistic memoir . . . A disquieting profile of a country and its people.?
"?Newsweek"

"Will you please come back and play for the club Aoife?". Aidan asks his twin sister this question every week. Twins, Aoife and Aidan Power, along with their four best friends love playing Gaelic football. They spend most evenings after school playing football in the green in their picturesque rural village of "Droichead Beag". Aoife and Aidan are skilful and fast but when they combine on the same team, "Twin Power" is unleashed and they have an almost telepathic communication on the pitch, leading to some spectacular scores. But while Aoife loves football, an incident at a match almost two years earlier saw her stop training and playing with her local GAA club, Droichead Beag GAA. Aidan knows what happened, but Aoife refuses to tell her friends. Could it have something to do with their Under 12 counterparts in Gorman GAA, the rival parish team of Droichead Beag, where old rivalries run deep? And how will Aoife's refusal to play affect their school team when the children's teacher Ms. Kelly, herself a former All- Star football player announces an exciting new school's football competition, "Star Schools GAA"? Parish rivalries re-surface and threaten to get out of hand as the children of Droichead Beag National School fight tooth and nail to get their hands on the coveted first ever Star Schools Cup.

Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives – interesting, no doubt, but finally only a "subject" people, an inferior people with black faces'.

An incisive, unprecedented report on life inside Burma from the author of "Finding George Orwell in Burma"
On May 2, 2008, an enormous tropical cyclone made landfall in Burma, wreaking untold havoc and killing more than 138,000 people. In "No Bad News for the King," Emma Larkin, a Westerner who has been traveling to and secretly reporting on Burma for years, uses her extraordinary access and intimate understanding of the Burmese people to deliver a beautifully written and stunningly reported story that has never been told before. Chronicling the tragedy that unfolded in the chaotic days and months that followed the storm, she also examines the secretive politics of Burma's military dictatorship, a regime that relies on vicious military force and a bizarre combination of religion and mysticism to rule the country.

A fascinating political travelogue that traces the life and work of George Orwell, author of 1984 and ANIMAL FARM, in Southeast Asia Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, also known as Myanmar, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. It is the place George Orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. She was frequently told by Burmese acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their country - his first novel, Burmese Days - but in fact he wrote three, the "trilogy" that included Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet!" In one of the most intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and work of George Orwell as her compass. Going from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its vast network of spies and informers. Using Orwell enables her to show, effortlessly, the weight of the colonial experience on Burma today, the ghosts of which are invisible and everywhere. More important, she finds that the path she charts leads her to the people who have found ways to somehow resist the soul-crushing effects of life in this most cruel police state. And George Orwell's moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and keen powers of observation serve as the author's compass in another sense too: they are qualities she shares and they suffuse her book - the keenest and finest reckoning with life in this police state that has yet been written.