Bøker av Toby Green

In 1665 Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers: the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Portuguese Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today's Guinea-Bissau?In Cacheu Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, but also into the atmosphere of a very distant time and place. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses, what they wore, how they worshipped - and also the work they did, how they had fun, and how they healed themselves from illness.Through this story, the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires emerge in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationship between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was already an old one, with slaving entrepots, colonies, and military bases interweaving over many generations. But Cacheu also challenged the dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women like Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire.For the first time, through the surviving documents recording Peres's case, we can see what this world was really like. Cacheu is an extraordinary act of historical recovery. It is the story of a seventeenth-century West African woman, but also of the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived - its beliefs, values and people.

Elvis Jaramillo is a poor kid from a shantytown; Julián Restrepo is a rich kid taxi driver dreaming of becoming a rock star; Pamela Oswald the NGO worker from London who becomes fatally intertwined in their lives....In an unnamed Latin American country, society eats itself from the inside. Leila Halabi, a 2nd generation Palestinian immigrant, offers to house Pamela Oswald while she works at a rehabilitation centre for poor kids who are self-harming. But when Oswald discovers that Halabi's previous guest disappeared in unexplained circumstances, she becomes uneasy...Julián Restrepo picks Oswald up from the airport when she arrives in the capital city, Santa Fé, and the two become friends. Restrepo introduces her to the other members of his band: Jhonny Cruz the guitarist, Robert Stone, a cynical English journalist, and Raúl Bontera, a Chilean poet who tells Oswald of a new game he discovered in Colombia: Colombian Roulette - like Russian Roulette without the safety of the empty chambers...In a shantytown in distant Guadalajara, Elvis Jaramillo works alongside a mechanic calling himself the Angolan, a testament to his enslaved African ancestors. The Angolan shows Jaramillo how to make a life and survive. But then one of the Angolan's friends makes an offer Jaramillo can't refuse, and he leaves the only world he knows - a world where violence is the best opportunity going, and safety a luxury for those who can forget the past.How to achieve a lasting peace where human weakness and the political order will not allow it? It soon is clear that accepted truths are built on lies, and every alternative offers a route to disappearance. Restrepo and Oswald embark on a dangerous quest for the truth which brings them and Jaramillo together, in a country where the present implodes as the violence of the past is excavated, and the only war that has yet been declared is against itself.

4 CITIES, 4 LIVES, 1 CRIME, In Madrid, an Argentinian bookseller gets caught up in the scheme of an American professor to prevent an appalling crime. Her sidekicks soon include a Gambian migrant in Paris and a Spanish waitress in London. Seeking some sort of companionship in their exiles, the four characters join forces in a quest that becomes a dangerous obsession. All four lives seem to be fatefully connected. But how to get people to take the crime seriously if it does not yet exist? In Buenos Aires, the criminals are remorselessly pursued. They cross paths with a Nigerian judge, the wife of one of General Franco,s thugs, a caretaker to the wealthy, and Peter Halbtsen, an expert in Chinese culture. It is early March 2004. Halbtsen has spent years deciphering a book which may hold the key to the mystery. But where is the crime? Who is the criminal? And can anything be done to prevent humanity from reaping the whirlwind?