Michael Smith, at the US embassy in Cambodia, has an urgent assignment: do what it takes to help a US oil company secure its contract with the Cambodian government before upcoming elections strengthen a Chinese competitor. His affair with Zainab, the British charge's wife, complicates events. Unaware of Smith's role, Zainab pushes hard for reform, convincing her candidate to tie oil concessions to clean government, and Chinese concessions to the release of a dissident monk. The ruling party works for the monk's release, but insists that Zainab, a Buddhist herself, travels to the remote northern border for the handover. Smith considers a British diplomat's spouse to be a protected species in Cambodia. But does she really qualify?With tension, moral complexity and an authentic feel for modern Cambodia, The End of the Monsoon is a gripping story of love and the struggle for integrity.

End of the Monsoon

Literature & Fiction

John, Lathrop

Literary

John Murray Publishers

Late at night on the eleventh-floor balcony of a deserted building on the Persian Gulf, American businessman Steve Kemp finds himself falling back in love with Helen -- the Irishwoman he'd left more than a decade before -- as bombs explode below.  Kemp returned to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia as a last attempt to find success. Fired from his job in L.A. and divorced from his wife, he hoped to salvage his finances in a peaceful part of the Middle East. But he arrived to find a country on the verge of a political meltdown, where an explosive mix of resentment, revolt, and jihadists threatened the regime. And he found his old flame Helen, who was now married to a diplomat at the end of his career.  The overextended military props up the crumbling monarchy, buying a little time -- time Kemp and Helen use to rekindle their affair. As the country plunges into violent political crisis, Kemp focuses on financing his escape with Helen. All he needs is one last big sale -- their contract out.  The country enters its final descent when Kemp's sale at last appears. The deal will be complete once Kemp visits a correspondent bank. It is standard procedure. But suddenly the picture darkens. The bank is on the wrong side of an obscure island. Helen, and even her husband, may have had a hand in the sale. And the terms may be more ambiguous -- and more dangerous -- than Kemp had thought.  Written with compassion and a true understanding of the current politics and business world of the Middle East, The Desert Contract paints a dead-on portrait of Saudi Arabia's near future and, at the same time, deftly examines what happens when passion, commitment, and loyalties collide.

The Desert Contract

John Murray

<p>As outspoken in his day as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens are today, American freethinker and author ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL (1833-1899) was a notorious radical whose uncompromising views on religion and slavery (they were bad, in his opinion), women's suffrage (a good idea, he believed), and other contentious matters of his era made him a wildly popular orator and critic of 19th-century American culture and public life. As a speaker dedicated to expanding intellectual horizons and celebrating the value of skepticism, Ingersoll spoke frequently on such topics as atheism, freedom from the pressures of conformity, and the lives of philosophers who espoused such concepts. This collection of his most famous speeches includes the lectures: [ "The Gods" (1872) [ "Humboldt" (1869) [ "Thomas Paine" (1870) [ "Individuality" (1873) [ "Heretics and Heresies" (1874)</p>

A Discourse on the Law of Retaliation

History

BiblioLife

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