Small Wars Permitting
Dispatches from Foreign Lands.



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Since leaving suburban England at the age of 21 with an invitation to a wedding in Karachi and a yearning for adventure, Christina Lamb has spent 20 years living out of suitcases and reporting from all over the world.

Small Wars Permitting is a collection of her best reportage following some of the principal events of the last two decades everywhere from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. But Lamb’s main interest has always been in the untold stories, the people and places where others don’t go. Undaunted by danger, disease or despots, she has travelled by canoe through the remotest reaches of the Amazon rainforest in search of un-contacted Indians; journeyed to the world’s highest battlefield where avalanches take more victims than guns; joined a Rio samba school to infiltrate the crime rackets behind Carnival; stayed on a fattening farm in southern Nigeria; and survived a terrifying ambush by Taliban.

Among the characters she meets along the way are the Marsh Arabs who want Play Stations instead of buffaloes; the Special Forces hunting for Osama bin Laden; an Armenian compére for performing dolphins with whom she travels around Iraq during the war, and a much feared Afridi chief who slaughters a sheep washed down with warm Russian champagne in his fort on the Khyber Pass.
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Her writing is passionate, powerful and poetic, transforming reportage into literature. Through the stories she tells – and her own journey from self-confessed war junkie to devoted mother – Lamb chronicles the human consequences of conflict in the countries she has come to know and a life where she can never make arrangements without adding the proviso “small wars permitting”.

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