We celebrate and preserve world-class storytelling. Under our BookBlast® ePublishing imprint, we reissue high-quality, exclusive eBooks of out-of-print contemporary classics by our legacy estate authors — notably Lesley Blanch, Gael Elton Mayo and Professor Elton Mayo. These titles are available alongside their other titles in print with traditional publishers in the UK, US, Europe, Asia and beyond.
The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus by Lesley Blanch is widely recognized as one of the most significant inspirations behind Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Please note: BookBlast® no longer acts as a commercial agency for new submissions, focusing exclusively on our estates represented by our legacy agency arm and digital catalogue.
Lesley Blanch
THE SABRES OF PARADISE — Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus (biography & epic narrative history)
PHILIP MARSDEN – Like Tolstoy’s, Lesley Blanch’s sense of history is ultimately convincing not because of any sweeping theses, but because of its particularities, the quirks of individuals and their personal narratives, their deluded ambitions, their vanities and passions.
THE GUARDIAN – Crammed with truly fabulous stories of fighting and love and violent death … this profound and exhilarating book turns the struggle of the people of the Caucasus to remain independent of Russia into a universal saga … it is no wonder Shamyl had such a powerful influence on Tolstoy and Pushkin.
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – Twentieth-century Russia is only nineteenth-century Russia writ large. Miss Blanch’s book is therefore especially welcome for she has provided a gallery of Russian portraits and in the course of her story outlined Russian foreign policy through most of the nineteenth century. I can imagine no better introduction to modern Russia.
THE TIMES – A masterly account of Chechnya’s struggle against 19th-century Tsarist Russia, ominously relevant to today’s conflict. Lesley Blanch’s portrait of Shamyl, the Chechen leader-prophet, is widely admired and she is still consulted by historians.
LE MONDE – A magnificent historical drama; a marvellous, impassioned biography of Imam Shamyl.
Amazon UK Amazon US Turkish edition On Lesley Blanch & DUNE (YouTube)
FAR TO GO AND MANY TO LOVE — People and Places (non fiction)
MIRANDA SEYMOUR – “I love LB. WHAT a spirit. What courage. What class”
The collection opens with an illuminating introduction about her two great loves: émigré theatre director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, and twice-Goncourt-winning novelist, Romain Gary. Her impressions of people and places have an enduring intensity and she writes of them as vividly as she does her own experiences. We see rising stars Vivien Leigh and Peter Ustinov in 1940s London; and war reporter Germaine Kanova; the last great Ruritanian Queen Marie of Rumania in her Balkan setting; and Pierre Loti in Turkey, or rather Loti-land.
She was ahead of her time, ‘translating cultures’ to readers back home as she covered subjects as various as polygamy, the Orient Express and life in post-war Bulgaria; escaping Christmas in Mexico with her husband when he began to write Promise at Dawn; and journeying from Uzbekistan to Guatemala by way of North Africa and Mexico. Lesley Blanch describes her later travels in North Africa, and her love of Afghanistan which she visited in the 1970s before the Soviet invasion.
She was among a handful of strong women who led the way, doing their own thing – Rebecca West and Nancy Mitford among them. The lives and loves of Lesley Blanch and those trailblazing women of her generation who lived purposeful, intense lives, inspired a generation of women – Marianne Faithfull and Shirley Conran; the late Jackie Kennedy and Anaïs Nin among them.
Illustrated with unpublished sketches from Blanch’s portfolio from when she worked with Komisarjevsky, a friend and colleague of Sergei Diaghilev’s, founder of the Ballets Russes housed at the The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale.
THE DIARY OF ANAÏS NIN (1957) – “Lesley Blanch is herself Scheherazade . . . I was fascinated by the charm and with which she tells biographical facts . . . [with] great vitality, superb storytelling . . . My admiration for her was total”
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THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE — The stories of four nineteenth-century women who travelled East | ebook only (group biography & travel history)
A bestseller which has never gone out of print in English since first publication in 1954.
Lesley Blanch writes about four women who escaped from the constraints of nineteenth-century Europe and fled to the Middle East to find love and fulfilment — Isabel Burton (who married the Arabist and explorer Richard), Jane Digby el-Mezrab (Lady Ellenborough, the society beauty who ended up living in the Syrian desert with a Bedouin chieftain), Aimée Dubucq de Rivery (a French convent girl captured by pirates and sent to the Sultan’s harem in Istanbul), and Isabelle Eberhardt (a Swiss linguist who felt most comfortable in boy’s clothes and lived in the Sahara).
CARSON McCULLERS – A classic … a book of radiance and strength.
FREYA STARK – A book as excellent as its title. [In a letter to LB dated 5/12/80]
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.
UK print US print Foreword by Naomi Wolf
UK e-book US e-book Los Angeles Public Library Edition
REGENCY ENGLAND UNDRESSED — Harriette Wilson, the Greatest Courtesan of her Age (biography)
Lesley Blanch’s elegant novella-length introduction to the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, first published in 1955.
The reigning courtesan of Regency London, Harriette Wilson’s patrons included many of the distinguished men of her day, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron. Hard-pressed for money in middle age, her looks and youth gone, all she had left to sell were her memories. Deliberately written with an eye to blackmail, she sold her memoirs after offering to edit out any lovers who paid her the sum of £200. “Publish and be damned!” cried the Duke of Wellington. She did and she was.
ANNE SEBBA – “What do a modern New York psychoanalyst and a Regency London courtesan have in common? Both offer escape, relaxation and individual attention; both are expensive,” explains Lesley Blanch in her expansive introduction to the memoirs of the most famous of English courtesans.”
THE NINE TIGER MAN — A Satirical Romance (fiction)
THE NINE TIGER MAN — A Satirical Romance (fiction)When East meet West: in this satirical romance, Lesley Blanch recreates the British India of the 1850’s where representatives of Victoria’s England preside uneasily over the glittering remnants of the Moghul Empire. She pillories well-bred, seemingly charming individuals who behave exceedingly badly, and exposes their vices, in the piercing vein of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. The governing class is shown to be decadent and depraved.
The Rao divided women into two categories: those with bodies and those with jewels . . . Prim and proper Lady Florence and her down-to-earth maid, Rosie, first encounter a Maharajah’s heir, the Rao Jagnabad, warrior and slayer of nine tigers, when he visits England on a diplomatic mission. Fierce and handsome in gold-embroidered brocades and magnificent jewels, his powerful masculinity is overwhelming and unforgettable. Fate decrees that, some years later, the two women are marooned in a crumbling palace on a remote, jungly island during the Indian Mutiny. They find themselves in the sole custody of the Rao along with two dozen other Englishwomen.
A razor-sharp satire on class and Empire, Lesley Blanch uses humour, absurdity and caricature to expose the pretensions of Empire, the people who supported it, and the contradictions inherent in the colonial system. The paranoia of the culturally and morally bankrupt colonialists who fear rebellion and being outwitted by the people they oppress highlights the fragility of the imperial power structure.
The playwright Terence Rattigan who wrote the script based on the novel, for George Cukor’s unfinished feature film for 20th Century Fox, described it as being, “Romantic, outrageous . . . the purest ironic comedy.”
JOHN BARKHAM, NEW YORK WORLD — “A delicious tale of low behaviour in high places; with particular attention to the activities of an irresistible and gifted East Indian Prince who takes his own form of revenge against the entire English Empire by inducting a bevy of highborn English females into the fine points of Oriental eroticism, proving that Debrett’s Peerage is no match at all for the Karma Sutra.”
REBECCA WEST — “This book is exquisite, and a new story.”
OBSERVER — “A mocking confrontation of the attitudes of Clarissa and Fanny Hill set against an exotically sensuous Indian background.”
DAILY MAIL — “Cynical, sensual, amusing.”
PIERRE LOTI — Portrait of an Escapist (biography)
Dramatic travel writer, French naval officer who wore rouge and liked to disguise himself as a Turk or a Bedu, amateur acrobat, ebullient self-dramatist and romantic: Pierre Loti was a global celebrity before the concept was even thought of. When he died in 1923, he was given a state funeral, the only French writer to have received such an honour other than Victor Hugo. An unorthodox writer, Loti’s most outstanding creation was himself.
GABRIELLE ANNAN, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – Lesley Blanch is a most congenial biographer for this eccentric man … She has a natural sympathy with people who live out their fantasies … She also has the sense of humour her subject lacks, and is very funny without ever being unkind.
SPECTATOR – Lesley Blanch was one of the twentieth century’s most exotic travel writers.
WASHINGTON POST – An exceptionally good biography of an exceptionally interesting man.
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Gael Elton Mayo
HONEYMOON IN HELL (fiction)
HONEYMOON IN HELL (fiction)Honeymoon in Hell is an authentic World War II novel originally published by Doubleday in 1944. The debut novel of Gael Elton Mayo (1923-92) – artist, journalist and photographer who worked with Cartier Bresson, Capa and Chim in the early years of Magnum Photos – it was written by her at the age of nineteen.
The novel is based on Gael’s real-life experiences escaping Nazi-occupied France at the age of seventeen with her newborn baby boy and Russian-Polish husband. It offers a glimpse into a critical period in history, and is underpinned by a strong spirit of rebellion, resistance and defiance against oppressive regimes. The themes of romance, women’s experiences of war and childbirth and displacement, are remain more relevant than ever. So if you are a fan of Françoise Sagan and Patrick Modiano, look no further!
INDEPENDENT – Gael’s dash from Nazi-occupied France with her newborn baby at the beginning of the war – she was 17 – makes one of the great escape stories of our day.
THE MAD MOSAIC — A Life Story (memoir)
“On June 1940, while evacuation from Dunkirk was taking place in the north, my son was born at Cauderan near Bordeaux; we were part of the exodus which was surging down the roads to the south throughout June, at times under bombs from Italian planes.” So begins Gael’s autobiography. Shot at by the Nazis whilst escaping with her baby son and stateless Russian husband; boarding a refugee ship sailing to South America, Gael eventually reaches the safety of New York only to return to war-ravaged Europe. She describes working with Robert Capa and David Seymour at Magnum photographers, (both were killed, in Vietnam and Suez), and with Henri Cartier-Bresson in England for Capa’s brainchild, ‘Generation X’. She writes of Spain in the 1950s and Paris in the 1960s; of marriages and bereavement; of a chaotic, exciting life criss-crossing Europe and the USA.
GLASGOW SUNDAY STANDARD – Few refugee stories outside the Auschwitz range have the peculiar poignancy of Gael Elton Mayo’s.
THE TIMES – The Mad Mosaic has about it something of the disturbing impermanence of life depicted in the film Casablanca.
SEAMUS HEANEY, OBSERVER – An exhilarating autobiography.
THE END OF A DREAM (memoir & travel)
Gael writes about two homes she loved and lost in two very different regions of France — the Franche-Comté and Provence — in this travel-memoir.
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR – A marvellous, subtle knack of catching atmosphere and landscape, an ear for the spoken word that evokes half Balzac, half Alain Fournier … I loved it.
SPECTATOR – Gael Elton Mayo has a visual quality of writing and is a perceptive sociologist … This satire of modern mores ends up like a Proustian meditation on Time. Perhaps The End of a Dream should also be read as a Temps Retrouvé.
ELIZABETH LONGFORD, BOOKS – Gael Elton Mayo speaks of two unique regions of France with her magical voice that first enchanted me in The Mad Mosaic … The fierce independence of the Jura, the moody mountain in Provence, the vivid pictures of people, animals, wine, food, flowers — even the mistral — made me feel nostalgic about places I had never seen.
Now available in French, translated by Claire-Cécile Avril and Daphné Bernard
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Gael Elton Mayo BBC Radio interview Richard Baker (1983)
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