Peter Mayne (1908-1979) is to Morocco what Peter Mayle is to Provence or Lawrence Durrell to Greece. This 1953 classic in a new edition captures the very essence of the people and place. Having already learned to appreciate Muslim life when he was in Pakistan, Mayne bought a house in the labyrinthine back streets of Marrakesh. He wanted to settle there, not as a privileged visitor in a hotel or grand villa, but as one of the inhabitants. He learned their language, made friends, took part in their festivals, and wrote their letters. This is not a travel book in the accepted sense of the word-it is a record of personal experience in a region of foreign life well beyond the tourist's eye. Mayne contrives in a deceptively simple prose to disseminate in the air of an English November the spicy odors of North Africa; he has turned, for an hour, smog to shimmering sunlight, woven a texture of extraordinary charm.

A Year in Marrakesh

Travel

Mayne, Peter

Africa

Eland Publishing

Year in Marrakesh

Hippocrene Books

The Narrow Smile is a portrait of the Pathan and their highland home on either side of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. Peter Mayne grew up in India, and later spent four years on the Northwest Frontier during the Second World War. Mayne delighted in the company of these fierce but hospitable highlanders, who were as hard as the mountains that assured their independence but democratic to the point that no man admitted the right of another to lead him. In 1953, Mayne took a long journey to see what had become of his old friends in the high, flower-filled valleys on the roof of the world. But peace had always been a relative concept on this frontier, where Afghanistan was now eyeing Pashtun lands in a new iteration of the Great Game. Mayne's misadventures are sometimes serious, often very funny, and at all times compassionate.

The Narrow Smile: A Journey back to the Northwest Frontier (Eland Classics)

Asia

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Books by Mayne, Peter