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".

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.

"'Going to law courts is a good education for a novelist. It provides you with the most extravagant material, and it teaches the near impossibility of reaching the truth.'"

Sybille Bedford, "Paris Review" (1993)

For "The Faces of Justice" (1961) Sybille Bedford journeyed through Europe to sit in the press box of the courts of law - high courts, low courts, police courts. In England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, she watched the prisoners at the bar, the accusing community arrayed against them, the advocates, the jurors, the judges on the bench. She saw justice being attempted under the law - the best we can do, the worst we can do - varying in subtle yet astonishing ways from country to country. The result is a story about justice, humanity and the individual - moving, dramatic, superbly observed, splendidly told.

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.

Beginning in 1956 with the publication of A Legacy, Sybille Bedford has narrated - in fiction and non-fiction - what has been by turns her sensuous, harrowing, altogether remarkable life. In this magnificent memoir, she moves from Berlin during the Great War to the artists' set on the Cote d'Azur of the 1920s, through lovers, mentors, seducers and friends, and from genteel yet shabby poverty to relative comfort in London's Chelsea. Whether evoking the simple sumptuousness of a home-cooked meal or tracing the heart-rending outline of an intimate betrayal, she offers spellbinding reflections on how history imprints itself on private lives.

On the marriage of Julius von Felden and Melanie Merz, the fortunes of two families are somewhat fatally entwined. In A Legacy, Sybille Bedford depicts their vastly different worlds the wealthy bourgeois life of the Merzes in Berlin and the aristocratic eccentricity of the von Felden dynasty in rural Baden. Portrayed with exquisite wit and acute observation, their personal upheavals and tragedies are set against the menacing backdrop of a newly unified Germany combined with Prussian militarism in the decades before the First World War.

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.