Friday, January 29, 2016

Can you imagine booking a holiday here?






When Count Gustav von Grabenstein went on holidays to Southeast Asia, he wanted privacy, security, the comforts of Europe and somewhere to go fishing.

Gus Grabenstein, 15th Century visionary
He built this quaint weekender in 1436 on the little spot he found in a real estate scroll enticingly labelled “get away from it all on this remote private island.”

He neglected to read the bit, written in a fine nib, “a challenging project for someone with flair”

Not to be outdone, Gus set about constructing his dream fishing cottage complete with waterfront access and somewhere to tie up his dingy. He called it “Friedenplatz”

Now this delightful location can be your dream escape too.

Book this wonderful cottage on Luftkoje today.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Art Deco Airports - the world’s first airports in the 1920s and 1930s


Art Deco Airports


By Terry Moyle

Art Deco Airports delves into the design and role of the world’s first airports in the 1920s and 1930s. With original images, comprehensive and dandy illustration by international aviation artist Rosie Louise and text by author Terry Moyle, the book explores the relationship between airports, aviation and Art Deco.



These first airports were not only concerned with commercial air transport but were also an important social venue. Millions of spectators flocked to airports each year and helped define aviation’s ‘Golden Age’. The airport architects also celebrated the achievement of flight in designs that were regional, as well as modern and functional. Art Deco Airports recreates this period with detailed and atmospheric depictions of the buildings, aircraft and fashions to create a beautiful and essential aviation book.

With profiles on 33 different airports in Great Britain, Europe and the United States, Art Deco Airports provides both specialist and armchair passengers with a window on an exotic lost world.

Published NOV 2015

PRINT RRP $45.00

FORMAT: HARDBACK


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Terry Moyle has a keen interest in 1920s and 1930s commercial aviation.

A professional artist and writer, Terry collaborates with artist Rosie Louise as Contour Creative Studio and has an MA (Hons) in English.

Rosie Louise Dip. GD, BFA (Aus) is an illustrator specialising in vector graphics. Her designs are represented in a wide range of art applications. Rosie is an international aviation artist; her art has appeared on the covers of award-winning books and she has designed hundreds of aviation postcards and many paper aircraft models from the Golden Age of Aviation.

Friday, January 15, 2016

From Pulitzer Prize winner comes Afghanistan's Romeo and Juliet, the true story of how they defied their families and escaped an honour killing.


Publishing in February, THE LOVERS by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Rod Nordland, tells the true story of a young Afghan couple from different ethnic backgrounds who are willing to risk everything for love — struggling to stay together in the face of danger and the threat of death that their relationship poses.

This is a riveting, real-life equivalent of The Kite Runner and an astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving portrayal that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women's rights in the Muslim world.

The book grew out of a series of articles Rod Nordland wrote for The New York Times in which he described the star crossed lovers as a modern day Romeo and Juliet. Zakia is a Sunni, her lover Mohammad Ali a Shia, and although as children growing up in the same village they would play together, as they grew older contact was strictly forbidden. By that point they were deeply in love.

When the author first encountered the couple, Zakia was locked up in a shelter and Mohammad was forbidden to see her. They escaped and were hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan where Nordland tracked them down as they continued to evade capture. They had no money and no food and relied on the kindness of strangers to give them shelter a day at a time as they remained on the run.

Rod says: 'This is both a great love story, and a great way to look at the difficulties faced by women in Afghanistan, which is really on the frontlines of the struggle for women's rights in conservative Islamic countries. The most rewarding thing about working on this book, for me, was to discover how the lovers' appreciation for poetry and for the great Persian love stories that preceded them informed and motivated much of what they did, even though they themselves are unlettered and uneducated. It is a real triumph for the heart in a society that officially outlaws love, and bans young people from choosing their own mates.'

Rod Nordland is currently a correspondent-at-large for The New York Times, working throughout the Middle East and South Asia; he spent more than three years as the paper's bureau chief in Kabul. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in the US, was a Pulitzer Finalist for International Reporting, studied as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and has received many honours including two George Polk awards and half a dozen Overseas Press Club awards. Nordland has worked for three decades as a foreign correspondent in over 150 countries. When not in Kabul, his second home is London.

Published by Hachette Australia in February 2016,

Paperback, RRP $35.00, Ebook RRP $16.99