Running a bed and breakfast in Riad Waqi, an old courtyard house in exotic Marrakech, is not the escape it seems for Ramzi, a disillusioned Scottish scientist. He cannot decide who are more exasperating, staff or guests, especially when one of the visitors, Paul Gallisot, a young Frenchman, is murdered in the city.Up for a challenge, Ramzi turns detective and makes his own investigations into the killing, at a time when Morocco prepares for the festival of Eid and the ritual slaugh...

‘Sad is the day when the children of our revolution become our enemies.’ 1987. Algeria is on the brink of civil war.  In the market square in El Oued, a political fugitive Muhammad Madani poses as Rahwun, the storyteller.  With tales that roar back and forth through time, he narrates the history of that magical and formidable country, fables of intrigue and of strife, of children sold and of women forsaken, of families uprooted and of families emigrating to Franc...

Fado, a word meaning fate or destiny, refers to a type of music that embodies the Portuguese spirit of yearning.Told by a mysterious narrator, Fado is a novelette that spans one year, a year marked by religious and pagan festivals, political holidays and the seasons.At the heart of the tale are two characters, Maria Salvador, a Fado singer from Lisbon, and from Porto, Joaquim Oliveira, a veteran of the Colonial War in Mozambique, who suffers from PTSD, post-traumatic stress...

The Cook. The Dervish. The Geographer. The Artist. The Jongleur. The Scholar.  The Historian.  A group of men are imprisoned by their Sultan and await death; they are to be executed for petty crimes.  They all have one regret—not to have done the pilgrimage to Mecca. Whereupon, a talking parrot, centuries old, flies into their cell and rebukes them, suggesting they undertake the overland pilgrimage in their minds.   So the prisoners imagine the journey, weaving ...

Hydrogen: the lightest element, the lifting gas of airships—and highly inflammable.Lakehurst New Jersey, crash site of the Hindenburg. Alone in a motel room Peter Miller recalls how, as a German ten year old, he stowed away on a Zeppelin, shot down in a bombing raid on London in 1916. The only survivor, he is raised as an English orphan at a school for destitute boys founded by the eccentric Dr Hatropp.As a Fleet Street journalist, dispatched to Be...