Serif imprint: 20 books

Throughout southern Africa, shebeens are where jokes are born, news is embellished and exchanged. They are unique vantage points where men go after a day's work, both to escape from the troubled world around them and to observe and comment on it. In Shebeen Tales, Zimbabwe's leading author offers...

By any standards, Waldermar Lotnik's experience of the Second World War was remarkable. Fighting in the Polish Resistance, his unit was engaged in a bitter ethnic conflict with pro-Nazi Ukrainians. Unknown in the West, this struggle was, like that raging at the same time between Serbs and Croats,...

Angola's civil war was the longest in Africa. Once the battleground for a proxy war between the Cold War superpowers, the country was supposed to become a model for a smooth transition from armed conflict to democracy. The government, earlier backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and the UNITA rebels,...

'Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves, express a life that has never found expression.' J.M. Synge did exactly as W.B. Yeats suggested and, revisiting these harsh yet beautiful specks of land off Ireland's west coast over a period of five years, created a...

Gerald Brenan returned to Spain in 1949 for the first time since the Civil War. He was determined to see what had become of the country he loved, to speak to ordinary people and to experience life in small towns unvisited by foreigners. He had earlier lived in a remote village in the Sierra Nevada...

This acclaimed book remains the only comprehensive study of the IRA and Sinn Fein's attempts to create a 'social republicanism', a marriage between militant nationalism and the politics of the left. From agitation amongst the peasantry in the 1920s and collaboration with the Nazis during the Second...

Covering all aspects of Jamaican cuisine from soups to preserves, fish to ices,Classic Jamaican Cooking also presents a range of traditional herbal remedies and drinks. With recipes as varied as Plantain Tart and Shrimp Soup, Salt Fish Patties and Coconut Ice Cream, this book dispels forever the myth...

Bigot Hall is the nightmare home of a family that most people would prefer to forget, but which Steve Aylett chooses to celebrate. Uncle Burst believes his face is made of pasta; the violent, grill-mouthed Uncle Snapper is confined to a treehouse; Uncle Blute is drowned in the lake at the wheel of...

J.M. Synge was a tireless traveller who, while celebrating the beauties of the Irish landscape, never flinched from describing the harsh, unromantic reality of rural life. Capturing the embers of a dying culture, the great playwright walks, drinks and talks with a rich assortment of country...

'Savage talked about his life as a re-offender. How could someone be offended by the same thing twice? Was nothing learnt?' Beerlight, the city of all of our futures, is not a safe place. Weaponry, rather than fast cars or designer clothes, is the ultimate status symbol. The populace is dedicated...

The Parsis are descendants of the Zoroastrians who left Persia 1,300 years ago and settled along India's western coast. Their aromatic cuisine, which combines the sophistication of Persian and Middle Eastern cooking with the heat and spice of the subcontinent's, is one of Asia's last great culinary...

Liverpool in its nineteenth- and twentieth-century heyday was a city unlike any other. Its praises sung by Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorn and many others, it was the first place in Europe where the Chinese New Year was celebrated, the birthplace of shipping lines that pioneered...

'Beerlight was a blown circuit, where to kill a man was less a murder than a mannerism … Crime was the new and only artform.' A book with its own nervous system, Slaughtermatic follows Dante Cubit through the streets of Beerlight as he hunts for a crime mentor, tangling with Chief Henry Blince...

‘“Here’s one you won’t get – a paradox. ‘A’ states that everything ‘B’ says is a lie. ‘B’ states that everything ‘A’ says is true.” … “Easy. A and B are lying and mistaken, both and simultaneously. Happens all the time.”’ About to quit the failed experiment...