Mexico, through the eyes of Sybille Bedford is a country of passion and paradox: arid desert and shrieking jungle, harsh sun and deep shadow, violence and sentimentality. In her frank descriptions of the horrors of travel - through bug-infested jungle, trapped in a broiling stationary train, or in a bus with a dead fish slapping against her face - she gains our trust. But it is the charmed world of Don Otavio which steals our imagination. He is, she says, "one of the kindest men I ever met". She stays in his crumbling ancestral mansion, living a life of provincial ease and observing with glee the intense life of a Mexican neighbourhood.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Sybille Bedford's latest novel walks the borderline between autobiography and fiction. It picks up where A Legacy leaves off, leading us from the Kaiser's Germany into the wider Europe of the 1920s and the limbo between world wars. The narrator, Billi, tells the story of her apprenticeship to life, and of her many teachers: her father, a pleasure-loving German baron; her brilliant, beautiful, erratic English mother; and later, on the Mediterranean coast of France, the Huxleys, Aldous and Maria. Jigsaw, wrote the Sunday Times, is "the most unusual, most resonant of all Sybille Bedford's unusual and resonant books".

Sybille Bedford once wrote that travel writing is inseparable from the writer's tastes, idiosyncrasies, and general temperament - it is what happens to him when he is confronted with a column, a bird, a sage, a cheat, a riot; wine, fruit, dirt; the delay in the dirt, the failing airplane. 'Pleasures and Landscapes' is what happened to Mrs Bedford when, at the peak of her literary powers, she traveled through France, Italy, and the rest of Europe for Vogue, Esquire, and other magazines - eight classic essays that secure her a place at the table with A.J. Liebling and M.F.K. Fisher.

Novelist Sybille Bedford watched courts closely-and with remarkable insight-in England, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Austria. There, she found stories of human frailty and impulsive action, among both the defendants facing judgment in court and the judges and juries deciding their fates. Their tales are fascinating and resonate today.

Not only are the social and political differences apparent in these countries and in their machinery of crime and justice, but also their historic perceptions of fairness and order are laid bare. In the process, Bedford recounts the compelling saga of a father on trial in Germany for killing the man who repeatedly exposed himself to the defendant's young daughter, the immigrant in Switzerland who swiped a watch to impress a chambermaid, the Algerians in France who shot up a series of Parisian cafes, and the English woman sentenced for forgetting to pay for her butter while she was distracted by sudden news that her father was dying. Scores of other gripping stories are shared, across several cultures and systems.

Although this book has long been recognized as an outstanding account of comparative legal systems and courtroom procedure, it does not read at all like a dry legal study. Bedford focuses on the real people involved, and writes with depth and feeling, leading to the wide acclaim this classic book has enjoyed over the years. It is accessible and interesting to a general audience, students, and those interested in how courts work and judges act-at the most basic level.