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"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 Elton Mayo's nail-biting autobiography. Shot at by the Nazis whilst escaping into Free France with her baby son and stateless White Russian husband; boarding a refugee ship sailing from Spain to South America, Gael eventually reaches the safety of New York, only to return to war-ravaged Europe.She writes of bohemian life in Spain in the 1950s and Paris in the 1960s; and 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'.Her Australian-born father was a renowned industrial psychologist at Harvard. The traumatic impact of being sent away to boarding school aged eight scarred Gael for life. Artist, novelist, journalist and mother, her chaotic life travelling back and forth between America and Europe was beset by financial insecurity, broken marriages, intermittent love affairs and, in later years, recurring attacks of facial cancer.First-hand accounts of World War Two and the fight for freedom against authoritarian populism are ominously relevant to Western democracies today. The Mad Mosaic stands as a triumph of thehuman spirit over adversity. It is a tale of courage and optimism; survival and hope.SEAMUS HEANEY, OBSERVER - An exhilarating autobiography.GLASGOW SUNDAY STANDARD - Few refugee stories outside the Auschwitz range have the peculiar poignancy of Gael Elton Mayo's.ALASTAIR FORBES, SPECTATOR - A compulsively readable, and often deeply moving account of an unusually careless if seldom carefree life led in a rather crazy cat's-cradle criss-cross between American and Europe.ELIZABETH LONGFORD, BOOKS & BOOKMEN - I have never read an autobiography like this one. I was hooked after the first half-dozen pages. A mixture of Kafka and Alice in Wonderland.IRISH TIMES - An interesting woman and a cool intelligent writer.BIRMINGHAM POST - Full of lively comment and atmospheric description.COURIER MAIL - Her pen inks the period in brilliant cameos. The pictures show a wistful sense of how much that was simple and good about life has been lost in humankind's rush towards the end of the 20th century. Her story is a reflection of life as lived by the free thinkers of the period.THE TIMES - The Mad Mosaic has about it something of the disturbing impermanence of life depicted in the film Casablanca.Gael Elton Mayo (1923-92) was the youngest daughter of a pioneering, Australian-born professor of industrial psychology at Harvard. She married a white Russian during World War Two, when she was seventeen, and nearly died of puerperal fever after giving birth to their son during the bombardment of Bordeaux. They eventually escaped from war-torn France, recounted in her first novel published by Doubleday, New York, when she was twenty. As a writer she had five more novels published and three volumes of autobiography & memoir; as a painter she had nine exhibitions; and as a singer-songwriter she appeared on TV. She endured numerous facial cancer operations in the later years of her life.

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's only novel is outrageous and written with high-spirited panache.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."TIME - "Wildly funny."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."ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lesley Blanch was a distinguished writer, artist, drama critic, and features editor of British Vogue during World War Two. In 1946 she sailed from England to travel the world with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. By the time they reached Hollywood in the 1950s they were literary celebrities. Their marriage of eighteen years ended when Gary left her for the young actress, Jean Seberg. Blanch headed East to travel across Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Turkey, Iran, Samarkand, Afghanistan, Egypt, the Sahara. Born in 1904, she died aged 103, having gone from being a household name to a mysterious and neglected living legend. The author of twelve books, including Journey into the Mind's Eye, Pierre Loti, The Sabres of Paradise, and Round the World in Eighty Dishes, her memoirs - On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life - are published by Virago and La Table Ronde in France. A follow up volume of her writings, Far To Go and Many To Love: People and Places, is published by Quartet Books.

The Sabres of Paradise was first published in 1960, a hundred years after the story it recounts had ended. The Soviet Union was at the height of its power and the Caucasus had been coerced into submissive conformity by the brutalities of Stalin. Today, the narrative is a lot more relevant - post-Vietnam, post-Afghanistan, post-Soviet Union and post-September 11. A dramatist by training, Lesley's Blanch's bold work of narrative non fiction - the definitive biography of Imam Shamyl - builds the story scene by scene of two worlds brought into sudden juxtaposition. It is the product of six years of diligent and scholarly research done in Russia and the Caucasus, including tracing his descendants in Turkey and Egypt. During the Caucasian Wars of Independence of 1834-1859, the warring mountain tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya united under the charismatic leadership of the Muslim chieftain known as the 'Lion of Daghestan'. For years, Shamyl defied his enemy, the Tsar, who had taken his eldest son as a hostage to St Petersburg. Shamyl captured in turn two Georgian princesses (from the Tzarina's entourage), a French governess, and the children, and kept them in his harem until they could be exchanged for his son. Also a historical narrative, there are beautiful descriptions of the Caucasus - a region of supreme natural beauty and mighty mountain ranges - and the campaigns in which Lermontov and Tolstoy participated. BRIAN ALDISS ― "A book as thick with flavour as roast wild boar, tusks and all. One of the most nutritious books I have ever read." PHILIP MARSDEN ― "Like Tolstoy's, her 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." HAMISH BOWLES in Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years ― "Jacqueline Kennedy and Khrushchev maintained a spirited badinage through dinner. Mrs Kennedy had recently read The Sabres of Paradise, Lesley Blanch's dashing history of the Muslim tribes' resistance to Russian expansionism in the Caucasus, and attempted to engage the Soviet premier in conversation on the subject. He responded with the comparative numbers of teachers per capita in the Soviet and Czarist Ukraine. She cut him off with the playful riposte, "Oh, Mr Chairman, don't bore me with statistics." NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ― "I can imagine no better introduction to modern Russia." LE MONDE ― "A magnificent historical drama; a marvellous, impassioned biography of Imam Shamyl." AUTHOR BIO Lesley Blanch was a distinguished writer, artist, drama critic, and features editor of British Vogue during World War Two. In 1946 she sailed from England to travel the world with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. By the time they reached Hollywood in the 1950s they were literary celebrities. Their marriage of eighteen years ended when Gary left her for the young actress, Jean Seberg. Blanch headed East to travel across Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Turkey, Iran, Samarkand, Afghanistan, Egypt, the Sahara. Born in 1904, she died aged 103, having gone from being a household name to a mysterious and neglected living legend. The author of twelve books, including Journey into the Mind's Eye, Pierre Loti, The Sabres of Paradise, and Round the World in Eighty Dishes, her memoirs - On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life - are published by Virago and La Table Ronde in France. A follow up volume of writings Far To Go and Many To Love: People and Places is published by Quartet Books.