The Bronski House: A Return to The Borderlands

Marsden, Philip

Biographies & Memoirs

HARPER/COLLINS

More than fifty years after fleeing the Russians and Nazis, poet  Zofia Ilinska returns to the tiny Eastern European village of her birth  to find her old home and to rediscover her childhood and the history of  her family."

The Bronski House: A Return to the Borderlands

Historical

Harpercollins

The acclaimed first novel by one of Flamingo's most gifted young writers, author of `The Bronski House' and `The Spirit Wrestlers'.Philip Marsden's brilliant first novel is set in the 1930s, in the small Cornish fishing village of Polmayne. A newcomer to the village, Jack Sweeney, buys a boat and establishes himself as a fisherman, gradually winning the respect even of the village elders. But times are changing, and a new kind of visitor is beginning to appear in Polmayne. A bohemian colony of artists offends some sensibilities, while a hotel is opened to accommodate the summer tourists, and pleasure steamers mingle with the fishing boats in the harbour.Yet, despite the superficial changes, the old ways and the old hazards of Cornish life endure. Offshore, just below the surface of the waves, lie the Main Cages, a treacherous outcrop of rock where many ships and many lives have been lost.Firmly rooted in a particular place and time, yet recalling in its universality such books as Graham Swift's `Waterland' and E. Annie Proulx's `The Shipping News', `The Main Cages' is a gripping story of love and death, and a remarkable fictional debut.

The Main Cages

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Flamingo/ HarperCollins

Philip Marsden's rollicking history of Tewodros II, emperor of Ethiopia, powers along with all the drama of a finely honed thriller.A fascinating narrative excursion into a bizarre episode in 19th century Ethiopian and British imperial history featuring a remote African despot and his European-built gun.

The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy

History

Africa

HarperPress

BAREFOOT EMPEROR PB

Harperperennial

CHAINS OF HEAVEN

Reference

Atlases & Maps

Harper Perennial, London

Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven and the Age of Sail

A remarkable, multifaceted story made up of journal accounts, memories, conversations and personal experience, The Bronski House is a paean to Poland, a landmark in travel writing, and a family history tied together by the unique experience of returning from exile.In the summer of 1992, accompanied by Philip Marsden, the exiled poet Zofia Hinska stepped into the Belorussian village where she had spent her childhood. The Bronski House is in part the remarkable story of what she found. It is also the story of her mother, Helena Bronska of her coming of age during the Russian revolution, her dramatic escapes from Bolsheviks, Germans and partisans, of her love and loss in a now vanished world. It brilliantly reconstructs a world which vanished in 1939 when Soviet tanks rolled into eastern Poland.

The Bronski House (P.S)

Harper-perennial

A revised and updated edition of Philip Marsden’s classic travel book, published to coincide with the centenary of the Armenian massacres.
After centuries of prominence as a world power, Armenia has withstood every attempt during the 20th century to destroy it. With a name redolent both of dim antiquity and of a modern world and its tensions, the Armenians founded a civilization and underwent a diaspora that brought many of the great ideas of the East to Western Europe.
The Crossing Place is Philip Marsden’s gripping account of his remarkable journey through the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus in a quest to discover the secret of one of the world’s most extraordinary peoples.
Caught between opposing empires, between warring religions and ideologies – at the crossing place of history – the Armenians have somehow survived against the odds. This is their story – told by one of the finest travel writers at work today.

The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians

Europe

William Collins

In 2010, Philip Marsden, whom Giles Foden has called “one of our most thoughtful travel writers,” moved with his family to a rundown farmhouse in the countryside in Cornwall. From the moment he arrived, Marsden found himself fascinated by the landscape around him, and, in particular, by the traces of human history—and of the human relationship to the land—that could be seen all around him. Wanting to experience the idea more fully, he set out to walk across Cornwall, to the evocatively named Land’s End. Rising Ground is a record of that journey, but it is also so much more: a beautifully written meditation on place, nature, and human life that encompasses history, archaeology, geography, and the love of place that suffuses us when we finally find home. Firmly in a storied tradition of English nature writing that stretches from Gilbert White to Helen MacDonald, Rising Ground reveals the ways that places and peoples have interacted over time, from standing stones to footpaths, ancient habitations to modern highways. What does it mean to truly live in a place, and what does it take to understand, and honor, those who lived and died there long before we arrived? Like the best travel and nature writing, Rising Ground is written with the pace of a contemplative walk, and is rich with insight and a powerful sense of the long skein of years that links us to our ancestors. Marsden’s close, loving look at the small patch of earth around him is sure to help you see your own place—and your own home—anew.

Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place

Science & Math

Earth Sciences

University of Chicago Press

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Books by Marsden, Philip