Bøker av Stuart Blackburn

Luck of the Draw is a thriller laced with radical politics, divided loyalties, and personal tragedies. Ultimately, it is a story of love, loss, and survival.

A shaman chants to make the sun rise in the Apatani valley, high in the eastern Himalayas. A comparative analysis of this oral text, its ritual context and performer reveal the core ideas of local society, including fertility and cohesion.

This study of an oral tradition in northeast India is the first of its kind in this part of the eastern Himalayas. A comparative analysis reveals parallel stories in an area stretching from central Arunachal Pradesh into upland Southeast Asia and southwest China. The subject of the volume, the Apatanis, are a small population of Tibeto-Burman speakers who live in a narrow valley halfway between Tibet and Assam. Their origin myths, migration legends, oral histories, trickster tales and ritual chants, as well as performance contexts and genre system, reveal key cultural ideas and social practices, shifts in tribal identity and the reinvention of religion.

DescriptionThe Madras Presidency, 1911. It is 10:35 a.m., the appointed hour. A boy barely intomanhood, a British officer for the Crown, and a loaded pistol will create a moment inhistory, the echoes of which are still faintly heard today.Vanchinathan, a young boy from a poor Tamil family living in Shenkottai,at the foothills of the western ghats, defies his family and goes far away toattend college. Carried away in the rising tide of anger against colonial rule,he finds himself drawn to one of the militant traditionalist groups opposedto the British Raj. He is recruited, trained to be an assassin and tasked with asecret mission: he must kill Robert Ashe, a British officer who has earned theire of Vanchi''s mentors by suppressing a riot and jailing its leader. Buffeted byself-doubt and ideological misgivings, Vanchi finds himself on a knife-edge. AsAshe''s luxury train waits at an isolated station, will Vanchi raise his gun andshoot?Drawing upon a true story, Stuart Blackburn weaves together history, legendand narratives from South India''s colonial past to deliver a gripping yetnuanced novel.