ROBERT CHALMERS

IT was an almost isolated incident in Greek literary history, when Pythagoras claimed to remember his previous lives. Heracleides Ponticus relates that he professed to have been once born as Aethalides, the son of Hermes, and to have then obtained as a boon from his father zunta kai teleytunta mnemen exein tun symbainontun. Consequently he remembered the Trojan war, where, as Euphorbus, he was wounded by Menelaus, and, as Pythagoras, he could still recognise the shield which Menelaus had hung up in the temple of Apollo at Branchidae; and similarly he remembered his subsequent birth as Hermotimus, and then as Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos. But in India this recollection of previous lives is a common feature in the histories of the saints and heroes of sacred tradition; and it is especially mentioned by Manu as the effect of a self-denying and pious life. The doctrine of Metempsychosis, since the later Vedic period, has played such an important part in the history Of the national character and religious ideas that we need not be surprised to find that Buddhist literature from the earliest times (although giving a theory of its own to explain the transmigration) has always included the ages of the past as an authentic background to the founders historical life as Gautama.

Confuso y perdido a veces, encantador y simpático, el protagonista recuerda al Hugh Grant de Cuatro bodas y un funeral.A punto de perder su trabajo y ya dejando atrás la vida de veinteañero despreocupado para pasar a la de serio treinteañero, Daniel se siente algo confuso y no tiene muy claro que hacer con su vida. Esta enamorado de una mujer, Laura, con cierta tendencia a la infidelidad y cuyas aficiones son saltar en paracaidas o fotografiar perros. Y ahora tiene entre manos un extraño trabajo: elaborar las necrologicas de personalidades que por distintos motivos estan en el infierno.

Now available in paperback: 'East of Nowhere is a novel of wonderful surprises, an emotional see-saw that can be very funny, very sad and very brutal. This is a story about a love that shouldn't work at all, but triumphs against the odds.' (Michael Palin) This is the story of how a bad man called Edward Miller lost his job, his house, his wife, his hair and his front teeth, but in the process becomes good. It is the story of how, in his only ever truly sel.ess act, Edward risks all to save the woman he loves. In East of Nowhere, Robert Chalmers has created a dazzling ensemble cast of characters in a unique fiction for our times. It is as mordantly funny as it is breathtakingly true.