Songs At the River's Edge: Stories From a Bangladeshi Village

Fascinating and full of detail, this story of Katy Gardner's life in a Bangladeshi village accessible and easy to read at many different levels. For anthropologists, it provides an essential account of starting research in someone else's society. For pleasure, it reads as a fine novel, and as a piece of travel writing, it is evocative and absorbing. Katy Gardner writes about the friends she made, the characters she met, the rituals she witnessed, about Islam as practiced in that village and about women living in Purdah. She writes about trying, as a Western woman, to live the life of the village women. Her book is alive and memorable. The first edition was published by Virago and has been out of print since 1993.