The Caucasus--a region of supreme natural beauty and fiercely proud warriors--has throughout history been characterized by violence and turmoil. During the Great Caucasus War of 1834-1859, the warring mountain tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya united under the charismatic leadership of the Muslim chieftain Imam Shamyl, the "Lion of Daghestan", and held at bay the invading Russian army for nearly 25 years. Lesley Blanch vividly recounts the epic story of their heroic and bloody struggle for freedom and the life of a man still legendary in the Caucasus.

Tells the story of Shamyl, Imam of Daghestan, who united the warring Moslem tribes of the Caucasus in 1834 against the advancing armies of the Czar of Russia

Ideal reading for anyone looking for adventure and romance in unusual settings. Lesley Blanch writes about four strong women in The Wilder Shores of Love. Turning East, away from 19th Century Europe and conventional living, they found emancipation through escape and adventure. Isabel Burton married the Arabist and explorer Richard Burton; they worked together on his translation of A Thousand and One Nights; Jane Digby el-Mezrab (Lady Ellenborough, the society beauty), had four husbands and numerous lovers, including Honoré de Balzac and King Ludwig I of Bavaria. She ended up living in the Syrian desert with a young Bedouin chieftain; Aimée Dubucq de Rivery was a French convent girl who was captured at sea by pirates and became the consort of Sultan Abdul Hamid I; and Isabelle Eberhardt was a Swiss linguist who went to Algeria where she lived among tribesmen in the Sahara, converted to Islam, and dressed as a man. ANAIS NIN — “I read The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Blanch and became completely devoted to her writing. It is a book of great vitality, superb storytelling. She is herself Scheherazade telling about four remarkable women. I was fascinated by the charm and with which she tells biographical facts. The four women became my heroines. I read the book several times. My admiration for her was total. The Wilder Shores of Love would have made colourful and entrancing films.” CARSON McCULLERS — “The Wilder Shores of Love is a book of such radiance and strength.” FREYA STARK — “A book as excellent as its title.” WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD — “Love, wanderlust, faraway places – all that Romance implies – make up this delicious book.” NEW YORKER — “Four seething but most enjoyable studies in headlong nonconformity.” DAILY TELEGRAPH — “Enthralling to read.”

A stunning tale set in England, Paris, and Moscow, chronicling Blanch's love for an older Russian man and the passionate obsession that takes her to Siberia and beyond. “My book is not altogether autobiography, nor altogether travel or history either. You will just have to invent a new category,” Lesley Blanch wrote about Journey into the Mind’s Eye, a book that remains as singularly adventurous and intoxicating now as when it first came out in 1968. Russia seized Lesley Blanch when she was still a child. A mysterious traveler—swathed in Siberian furs, bearing Fabergé eggs and icons as gifts along with Russian fairy tales and fairy tales of Russia—came to visit her parents and left her starry-eyed. Years later the same man returned to sweep her off her feet. Her love affair with the Traveller, as she calls him, transformed her life and fueled an abiding fascination with Russia and Russian culture, one that would lead her to dingy apartments reeking of cabbage soup and piroshki on the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s, and to Siberia and beyond.

Growing up in the snowblower society of Buffalo, New York, Laura Pedersen's first words were most likely "turn the wheel into a skid." This vibrant memoir shares the humorous ups and downs of the Pedersens, who, like many families subsisting in the frigid North during the seventies, feared rising prices at the gas pump, argued about the thermostat, and fought over the dog to stay warm at night. While her parents were preoccupied with surviving separation and stagflation, Laura became the neighborhood wild child, skipping school to play poker, bet on horses, and trade stocks. This led her to an illustrious career on Wall Street - she became the youngest person with a seat on the American Stock Exchange and a millionaire by age twenty-one. Combining laugh-out-loud humor with a genuine slice of social history, Buffalo Gal paints a vivid portrait of an era.