To buy any of these books, visit my author page: https://www.amazon.com/Denise-B-Dailey/e/B079K29CV9

Listening to Pakistan

Pakistan stands front and center in current geopolitical intrigue and looms as a powder keg in U.S. relations in Asia and the Middle East – but unfortunately, the average American knows little about what makes Pakistan “tick.” Now we have an important new window from a female perspective on this mysterious, pivotal culture.

Readers agree that Denise B. Dailey’s Listening to Pakistan: A Woman’s Voice in a Veiled Land (Inkslingers Press, 2012) is a major contribution by an objective Western observer to our understanding of complex Pakistan. Soon after publication the e-book rose to # 1 bestseller ranking for Amazon Pakistan travel books, top-ten Amazon Kindle rankings in women’s studies and Asia travel – and multiple five-star reader ratings.

Listening to Pakistan is an analytical travel journal in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville – an account that brings the author’s rich background to bear in interpreting a volatile nation that will almost certainly continue to be a decisive geopolitical player in years to come.

Shortly after publication, Dailey’s account rose to the #1 bestseller position for all Amazon books on travel in Pakistan and also reached bestseller status among e-books on women’s studies and travel in Asia.

Far from being a detached report about a faraway place, Listening to Pakistan will make you a vicarious participant in Denise’s narrative as you witness a funeral cortege in a mountainous village, sing at a tribal polo match, enter philosophic musings with a tailor in his shop in far-off Skardu, discuss litotes with a desk clerk, puff round mountain passes at 15,000 feet, and understand firsthand what an earthquake recovery site entails. You’ll ride with her on the famed Karakoram Highway, grasping your seat as you skid along loose rocks and stare incredulously into craggy canyons and raging rivers hundreds of feet below.

You’ll join Denise in approaching wary border guards at the Khyber Pass – and in heeding a warning that your tall husband may be mistaken for Osama bin Laden. In rich language, Denise will share with you her tastes for local cuisine, Gandharan art and archeology, and in ethnic dress. Her arresting photographs of the people and places that populate her narrative complete her picture of remote Pakistan.

Click here to view a gallery of photos from my time in Pakistan.

Riko: Seductions of an Artist

A biography of a Czech artist educated in the 1920s and ’30s in the most artistically revolutionary capitals of the word: Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Paris, who gets caught in the Nazi dragnet through his marriage to a Czech Jew. The story follows their double exiles, first to war-time England, and then to the United States, where they delight and despair over re-establishing Riko as a first-class artist in the radically evolving cultural decades from the ’50s to the ’80s.

View Riko’s works here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/158520635@N05/sets/72157688137694756/

Read the Kirkus review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/denise-b-dailey/riko/

“Master prose stylist Denise B. Dailey is also a master of character. In her exquisitely observed Listening to Pakistan, Dailey reveals the character of that mysterious nation of rugged mountains and teeming cities through a penetrating look at its people and culture. In Riko: Seductions of an Artist, Dailey again gives us a riveting portrait of character—this time of a Czech artist, Jan Emmerich Mikeska and his wife Greta, whose story of escape and survival spans two world wars. Dailey, who was a friend of both, is fascinated by the complexities of these characters—an extraordinary amalgam of talent, ambition, and manipulativeness—which she portrays with honesty and sensitivity, giving us insight not only into the creative heart but also into the tumultuous times in which these compelling characters lived. Her prose, rich and detailed, offering many piercing anecdotes, is a reward in itself, as well as a worthy tribute to its complex, oh-so-human subjects.”

— Leslie T. Sharpe
author of The Quarry Fox and Editing Fact and Fiction

“Denise Dailey easily seduces her readers with her intimate yet journalistic observations of the almost forgotten Czech painter, Riko, whose “guarded smile I was to recognize had both casualness and purpose.” Seduced himself by light, beauty, landscapes, his wife Greta, and his own driving ambition, this is an absorbing portrait of a friendship with an artist who survived Nazi-occupied Prague to continue his artistic journey in London and in New York City.”

— Virginia Frances Schwartz
author of If I Just Had Two Wings, Initiation, Send One Angel Down, Messenger, 4 Kids, Nutz!, Crossing to Freedom, and The Virgin Charge

“In this mesmerizing, scrupulously researched biography, Denise Dailey takes us into the life of Czech artist, Jan Emmerich Mikeska. With graceful prose laced with colorful sketches, Dailey portrays his skilled talents as an artist, teacher, intellect and charismatic personality in bringing his life through two World Wars and two emigrations with Greta, his Jewish wife, supporter and accomplice in seduction.”

— F. James Rybka, MD
author of Bohuslav Martinů: The Compulsion to Compose

Leaving Guanabara

Leaving Guanabara details the idyllic growing up years of a young French girl born in Brazil while Europe, Asia and Africa are being destroyed by the Second World War. Unknown to the narrator, her father’s family is being murdered in France by that same war. It takes the death of her mother to waken the narrator to the fact that her mother’s dying wish will also make the narrator and her sister lose their country, friends, languages, music, foods, the caretakers they love, and their continent. The narrator’s life becomes one of displacements, and a quest to discover the genealogy her parents felt should be kept secret. Guanabara, the magnificent bay that defines Rio’s geography becomes a metaphor for those who lose what is most precious.

“Thirty-five years ago, Denise B. Dailey and her sister Arlette unpacked a chest their father had sealed almost thirty-five years before that—when, after the death of their mother, he closed their childhood home in Rio and resettled the silently grieving family in Montreal. The chest was filled with the artifacts of their Brazilian childhood—much like the memoir Dailey has conjured, a trove of beautifully rendered memories from a magical childhood. A happy childhood, and, long before the term was coined, a multicultural childhood, for her dashing father was French and her alluring and talented mother, Chilean-French, their friends Brazilian, German, American, indigenous.

 Yet childhood homes have musty cellars and secret passageways, and Dailey reveals the profound secrets stumbled upon as she wrote this story, secrets good people might keep to protect the children, secrets they might keep with the determination to live life well now.

In her previous two books—Listening to Pakistan, a travel memoir, and her award-winning Riko: Seductions of an Artist, a biography of the Czech painter Jan Emmerich Mikeska—Dailey masterfully told complex stories with wisdom, compassion, and insight. But this memoir is surely her chef d’oeuvre. It is written in stunningly graceful prose, by turns fresh as a child’s voice, savvy as a young mother’s, keen as a naturalist’s, judicious as a rabbi’s. You will fall in love with this family, and their story will break your heart. “

— Ann Darby, author of The Orphan Game