Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London society. But when her debilitating tuberculosis means exile, she and her devoted lady's maid, Sally, set sail for Egypt. It is Sally who describes, with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, the odd ménage (marshalled by the resourceful Omar) that travels down the Nile to a new life in Luxor.
When Lady Duff Gordon undoes her stays and takes to native dress, throwing herself into weekly salons, language lessons and excursions to the tombs, Sally too adapts to a new world, which affords her heady and heartfelt freedoms never known before. But freedom is a luxury that a maid can ill-afford, and when Sally grasps more than her status entitles her to, she is brutally reminded that she is mistress of nothing.
“The Mistress of Nothing” is the winner of the 2009 Governor General's Award for Fiction
Kate Pullinger was born in Vancouver, and now lives in London. She is the author of  “Tiny Lies”, a collection of short stories, and the novels “When the Monster Dies”, “Weird Sister” and “A Little Stranger.”. She collaborated with Jane Campion on the novel of the film The Piano, and has written for film, television and radio. She teaches creative writing and new media at De Montfort University.
“Burmese Lessons” is a love story. Unlike conventional love stories, this one takes the reader into a world as dangerous and heartbreaking as it is enchanting.
When Karen Connelly finds herself in Burma in the late 1990s, she is immersed in a world of students staging mass demonstrations in opposition to Burma’s dictators, revolutionaries fighting an armed insurgency against that same military regime, and refugees living in hellish limbo in Thailand. Connelly first comes to love a wounded, remarkably beautiful country, then a gifted man who has given his life to its struggle for political change. “Burmese Lessons” is illuminated by the sensual language and flashes of humour that have won her fans around the world.
Karen Connelly is the author of nine books of non-fiction, fiction and poetry, the most recent being “The Lizard Cage,” which the New York Times Book Review compared to the works of Solzhenitsyn, Mandela and Orwell. Raised in Calgary, Connelly has lived for extended periods of time in different parts of Asia and Europe and now has two homes, one in Toronto and one in Greece