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Water Environment Federation
Water Environment Federation (WEF)publishes a variety of technical publications, including newsletters,manuals of practice and other books, magazines, and journals.
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December 2021Frances Creighton: Found and Lost
by Kirby Porter
Set at the start of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, this is a love story about two schoolchildren in a culture dominated by divides that weren’t just sectarian. The story starts years later, in London, when Michael Roberts—unable to cope with his English girlfriend’s death—finds himself thinking back to Belfast in the late 1960s when he was in love for the first time. To his surprise and increasing torment, his memories—long buried—prove elusive, so that struggling to remember what happened and why he had suppressed it becomes more and more of an obsession. Frances Creighton: Found and Lost is a deeply felt first novel that conveys the pain of late adolescence in a community where school and religion add more layers of cruelty to the under-lying instability of daily life and Northern Irish politics.
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October 2021Mustard Seed Itinerary
by Robert Mullen
A satirical novel, set in medieval China, in which schoolmaster Po Cheng drinks too much and dreams that he has been elevated to the highest ranks of the imperial court, before discovering how fragile life's fortunes can be. Assisted in his dream by his teaching colleague Miss Ling, Po Cheng travels on a journey to the Chinese capital, rising up through the ranks of the civil service to become Prime Minister. Good fortune appears endless, but what Heaven—and alcohol—hand out, they can also claw back. Trouble is brewing inside and outside the city walls, and Po Cheng’s eminence means he must now face consequences that were inevitable from the start. Mustard Seed Itinerary is a brilliant first novel by an important new voice, bringing to the formal conventions of traditional Chinese literature the wry humour of Carrollian satire. As Mullen says, ‘In Daoism and Buddhism, dream journeys serve as voyages of discovery from which only a blockhead would return none the wiser. And Po Cheng is no blockhead.’
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December 2020A Road to Extinction
Can Palaeolithic Africans survive in the Andaman Islands?
by Jonathan Lawley
Extinction faces the Jarawa, perhaps the oldest tribe of human beings in the world, because of a road that runs through pristine forests in the Indian-administered Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, and no one seems to care. Tourists take the road each day to try and get selfies with the tribespeople, who came from what is now Botswana at least 60,000 years ago. Once proud of their independence, the Jarawa are now tempted with biscuits and trinkets, as if they were exotic animals in a human safari park. They cannot survive like this. In his astonishing book, Jonathan Lawley returns to what was once a penal colony built by the British to house Indian mutineers. He asks what responsibility colonial administrators like his grandfather may have had for the sad plight of these palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, and what the Indian government should be doing to protect them. Sumptuously illustrated with the author’s never-before-seen archive photographs.
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September 2021The Hopeful Traveller
by Janina David
The Hopeful Traveller is a collection of short stories about—and told by—single women who have put the past behind them but are still looking for their anchor in the present. It includes bitter-sweet accounts of the freedoms of postwar life, of foreign travel, of the rekindling of old friendships and of the search for new ones. The stories speak of cosmopolitan, self-confident, well-heeled characters, in an era just before the birth of feminism, conventional in their expectations of men, always just a step away from displacement and alienation. Set variously in Paris, Kalisz, Samarkand, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Erfurt, Singapore and London, these stories, from a much-admired veteran writer, offer a teasing mix of realism and fantasy, wish- fulfilment and regret. Some of these stories have appeared in translation in overseas annuals and collections.
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March 2022Spy Artist Prisoner
My Life in Romania under Fascist and Communist Rule
by George Tomaziu
The memoir of a Romanian artist who used his drawing skill to try and fight the Nazis and his government's ultra-nationalist government, only to thrown into prison, first by Romania's fascist regime and later by its Communists. Romania had allied itself with Nazi Germany in the Second World War to protect itself from the Soviet Union and to promote its own brand of fascist nationalism. When George Tomaziu, who had spent the 1930s preparing for a career as an artist, was invited to spy against Romania's fascists for Britain, he agreed because Britain then represented the only possible defence against Nazism. He went on to monitor German troop movements through Romania towards the Russian front, and observed, on one occasion, the mass-killing of Jews in the small Ukrainian town of Brailov, as well as briefly working as the artistic director of the world-famous Ukraine opera house. He knew he might be arrested, tortured and killed by Romania’s rightwing regime but thought that if he survived, his contribution to the war effort would be recognised. It wasn’t. After Romania turned Communist, he was sent back to prison in 1950 and kept him there for 13 years, in inhuman conditions. Following his release, the British ambassador in Bucharest helped him get out of Romania and he eventually settled in Paris, where he wrote this memoir.
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March 2021Postmark Africa
Half a Century as a Foreign Correspondent
by Michael Holman
Michael Holman's 50 years of eye-witness reports on the state of sub-Saharan Africa, written for the Financial Times and other media, provide a valuable perspective on the region’s post-independence successes and set-backs. The book is both relevant and readable, and a perfect introduction for students. From accounts of the atrocities committed by Rhodesian forces in the 1960s to interviews with Africa’s future leaders and assessments of how they actually performed, Postmark Africa brings together a lifetime of commentaries about a continent Michael Holman grew up in, knows acutely and loves dearly. Written with the benefit of unique access, Holman’s writings still hold out hope for Africa, in spite of decades of disappointment at the new nations’ structural mismanagement and corruption, the destructive policies of donor countries, and the hateful legacy of colonialism
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March 2022Belle Nash and the Bath Soufflé
by William Keeling
Set in Regency Bath, in the early 1830s, Belle Nash and the Bath Soufflé is a light period comedy with a strong moral backbone, and features a gay hero, Belle Nash, who is the star of a planned five-part series, The Gay Street Chronicles. The story begins when Mrs Gaia Champion hosts her first supper after the death of her husband, who had been the main defender of legal justice in the fashionable city of Bath, in the West of England. Sadly, the meal goes awry when a soufflé fails to rise. The failure is a mystery, but one that the book's hero, city councillor Bellerophon “Belle” Nash, determines to solve. Assisted by a group of eccentric lady friends, Belle explores Gaia’s culinary mishap, only to expose a web of corruption at the heart of Regency Bath’s judicial system. In doing so, he struggles to retain the love of his German boyfriend; and Princess Victoria persuades Gaia that all women can defeat the bonds of male repression. Welcome to The Gay Street Chronicles.
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March 2022Why My Wife Had To Die
by Brian Verity
The terrifying fact is that Huntington’s disease leads to physical and mental deterioration. There is no cure. It is handed down genetically, with a 1:2 chance of inheritance that cannot be determined until the disease shows itself, often not until the sufferer is in their 40s. Many do not know they have the gene or are at risk of passing it on. Those who do know, because a parent has suffered from it, may wait a lifetime before finding out whether they are safe or not. The prospects are horrific. After his first marriage failed, Brian Verity had a breakdown and married the woman who nursed him back to health. Within a few years, she began showing the signs of Huntington’s that he had seen in other members of her family and that he had a morbid fear of. Having fallen in love with her in hospital, he now found himself repelled, fearful of his own psychological fragility and inability to cope and yet committed to protecting her from the terrible distress that lay in wait. In his view, assisted dying was her only option. Was he right?
