5/5/08

Maja was five years old when her black Cuban family emigrated from the Caribbean to London, leaving her with one complete memory: a woman singing - in a voice both eerie and enthralling - at their farewell party. Now, almost twenty years later, Maja herself is a singer, pregnant and haunted by what she calls 'her Cuba'.

Eve, the 34 year old daughter of recently deceased conman Alexander Weston, knows a good deal when she sees it - and this one doesn't even come close. However, with vulnerable brother Terry being beaten in jail, she can't afford to be fussy. She needs to organise protection for him, and fast.

5.7.07

Everywhere you look, for heaven’s sake, there are ladies. Never mind for heaven’s sake, this is heaven. It is the Garden of Eden, where you are allowed to eat all the apples you want. The air itself is sexy. Never mind meanderings on hill tribes and Buddhist temple architecture, or burble about meditation and mantras, and dire warnings about ‘prostitutes’ and ‘the sex industry’.Because that is why you have come here. You are a man with ample leisure time and money in your pocket, and you are here for the ladies. Because they do it.

Once denounced as "wicked" "cheap" and "moral filth", "Peyton Place" sold millions of copies worldwide. As the curtains twitched in the mythical New England town of Peyton Place, this soapy story exposed the dirty secrets of 1950s small-town America: incest, adultery, repression and lust.