Colourful carved and decorated totem poles, beautiful beaded soft supple moccasins, fully beaded dresses and accessories, the deer dancer, the Bear Clan Hat, sky messages making material offerings to the spirits for guidance, bentwood boxes, chests, masks and canoes from British Columbia decorated with swirling symmetrical colourful pattern carvings, porcupine quills, birch bark and sweet grass used by the Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa) keep North American native traditional art alive. Here are garments of great celebrated leaders such as the shirt of Crazy Horse to pictures of Indians of All Tribes protesting at Alcatraz about their rights and properties, all about Indian and American education and the drive for justice and political recognition which led to new confrontations at Wounded Knee and Washington, DC. This magnificent celebration of Native American cultures and civilisations combines a wide-ranging text by scholars, writers and readers from tribes like the Standing Rock Sioux and Mohawk and Cherokee and Maya and many more, exploring the profound meaning of ceremonial life and its intimate connections with the land. There is a poignant chronicle of the impact of Indian boarding schools on Native families and cultures, the activist days of the 1970s and poems by Louise Erdrich and others and eloquent examples of a literary renaissance. 320 full page gorgeous colour illustrations depicting wondrous examples of indigenous cultures. 336pp in very large softback, 22.86 x 30cm, originally published in 2004 to commemorate the opening of the Museum of the American Indian.

In 1936 the abdication of King Edward VIII in order to marry Wallis Simpson dramatically divided public opinion. One of the King's high-profile supporters was Winston Churchill, who had tears in his eyes when he visited Edward as he prepared to leave his flamboyant Windsor residence Fort Belvedere for the last time. A friend of the Duke remarked that "there was nothing in him which understood the intellectual or spiritual sides of life", and several people, including Wallis, described him as never having progressed beyond boyhood. Wallis confided to a friend, "Can you imagine a more terrible fate than to have to live up publicly to the legend of a love you don't feel?" This fascinating book tells the story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as they now became, in the years following the abdication. Edward initially stayed with the Rothschilds, running up huge bills which no-one knew who was supposed to pay for. The Rothschilds' patience disappeared when Edward started to play the bagpipes at 3 am. Following marriage to Wallis, the couple travelled round Europe staying with friends, some of whom were Fascists. Wallis's lawyer worked for Hitler's top officials and the couple's Nazi sympathies were viewed with alarm. The couple were not to be invited to any embassy. In August 1939 the Duke telegraphed Hitler asking him not to go to war, to which Hitler replied that the "correct channel" must be found. When war broke out, Mountbatten took his destroyer across the channel to collect the couple. The Duke was reluctantly despatched to be governor of the Bahamas. En route they stayed in Portugal, where their security was ordered to shoot them if they fell into German hands during visits to the casino. In the Bahamas the couple lived a rackety lifestyle which included an unsolved murder in their entourage, and after the war they followed a monotonously swinging lifestyle in Paris. Archive photos, 410 pages.

We follow beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman. With diamond rings on her fingers and bespoke brogues on her feet, Ilia steps fearlessly into the world of cricket and riding to hounds. But, without prospect of work in a bleak, war-ravaged England, Esmond remembers the glorious ease of Cairo during his series of leave from the desert campaign and he decides to move there to start a bookshop, a branch of W. H. Smith's. But growing resistance to foreign interests, especially British, erupts in the 1952 uprising, and the Cairo Fire burns much of downtown, including the English bookshop. From letters and journals read only after the couple's death, from photographs found coiled in a film cylinder, from gifts and love tokens and mementos, the author pieces together the discoveries her parents made. It is a luminous memoir of a fraught union with unrequited hopes, richly intertwined with myth, the river Lethe feeling as real as the Nile. Vivid recollections of Cairo swirl with ever-present dreams of a city where Warner's parents, friends and associates are still restlessly wandering. 'An entrancing weave of memoir, history, autobiography and fiction, this is one of Marina Warner's most beautiful works.' 416pp, illus. and photos, paperback.