Norman Lewis

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As a young intelligence officer stationed in Naples following its liberation from Nazi forces, Norman Lewis recorded the lives of a proud and vibrant people forced to survive on prostitution, thievery, and a desperate belief in miracles and cures. The most popular of Lewis's twenty-seven books, Naples '44 is a landmark poetic study of the agony of wartime occupation and its ability to bring out the worst, and often the best, in human nature. In prose both heartrending and comic, Lewis describes an era of disillusionment, escapism, and hysteria in which the Allied occupiers mete out justice unfairly and fail to provide basic necessities to the populace while Neapolitan citizens accuse each other of being Nazi spies, women offer their bodies to the same Allied soldiers whose supplies they steal for sale on the black market, and angry young men organize militias to oppose "temporary" foreign rule. Yet over the chaotic din, Lewis sings intimately of the essential dignity of the Neapolitan people, whose traditions of civility, courage, and generosity of spirit shine through daily. This essential World War II book is as timely a read as ever.

A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy

Naples '44

Describes the author's three successful summers in a remote fishing village on the Costa Brava in the years following World War II, visits during which he witnessed how local life revolved around season sardine catches, the local bar, and feuds with neighboring villages. Reprint.

Voices of the Old Sea

Said to have inspired Greene's The Quiet American, A Dragon Apparent chronicles the charm and grandeur of the ancient native civilizations that survived until the devastation of the Vietnam War.

Travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

A Dragon Apparent

‘I’m looking for the people who have always been there, and belong to the places where they live’ In this rich and fascinating second volume of memoirs, following the classic I Came, I Saw, Norman Lewis takes us from Enfield to Guatemala via Brazil and to Peru by way of Braintree, heartland of the paranormal, not to mention Vietnam, Burma, Spain, Cuba, Sicily and India. He recounts his wartime career, his life abroad and at home and his reminiscences of Ian Fleming and Ernest Hemingway with his characteristic humour, sharp eye for detail and keen delight in the absurd. ‘He is a specialist in communicating his own peculiar sense of the futilities of travel, even when he was investigating in the utmost discomfort and difficulty a business as terrible as the genocide of the Brazilian Indians. He never wastes time on being indignant. But he is frequently surprising’ John Bayley, London Review of Books ‘He is a rare witness to our century and to the larcenies we have committed in remote places, hoping not to be seen. He has made, in his quiet way, an enduring impact on this planet. But he can be read for giggles, too’ Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph ‘Vintage Norman Lewis; the light lash of his humour, his sniffer-dog’s nose for the quirky, the lyrical brilliance of his prose’ Guardian ‘One of the greatest – and most egotistical – travel writers of our age’ Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

The World, the World

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The Honoured Society describes how the US army returned the Mafia to power in 1944, after Mussolini came close to destroying them. It looks at the Mafia in their homeland - how in attempting to preserve Sicily for the Sicilians in the face of countless invasions, it infiltrated every aspect of the island's life, corrupting landowners, the police, the judiciary and even the church. In one chilling chapter, Norman Lewis details the escapades of eighty-year-old Padre Camelo, who led his monks on sprees of murder and extortion, frequently using the confessional box for transmitting threats.

The Sicilian Mafia Observed

The Honoured Society

Napoli '44

The final book by the master travel writer recalls the author's journey to war-torn Spain in 1934, recounting nights spent sleeping in caves and days spent dodging sniper fire as he traversed the Iberian peninsula.

Crossing Spain on the Brink of Civil War

The Tomb in Seville

The March of the Long Shadows (Arena Books)

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Exercises designed to develop vocabulary skills present words together with their pronunciations, definitions and use in sentences. Reissue.

View of the World

Honored Society

Norman Lewis's autobiography was originally published as Jackdaw Cake in 1985. It is now re-published with 50 new pages increasing in depth the story in the 1960s and 1970s, recording his time spent in the south of Italy.

"an Autobiography"

I Came, I Saw

The author recounts his childhood in Wales, his parents' seances, his marriage to the daughter of a Sicilian Mafia leader, and his experiences in the Intelligence Corps in Algeria

Jackdaw Cake

All of the color, gaiety, and charm of Burma springs to life with this master story-teller, despite the fact that at the time of his visit much of the country was controlled by insurgents.

Travels in Burma

Golden Earth

Presents an account of a journey Norman Lewis made in 1934 with his Sicilian brother-in-law Eugene Corvaja. Their destination was the cathedral in Seville, site of the Corvaja family tomb. Things, of course, do not go quite according to plan.

Norman Lewis

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