Two writers whose latest books blend memoir, travel writing and anthropology will be brought together in conversation at the Marylebone shop of Daunt Books in London next month. One is Hugh Brody, whose Landscapes of Silence I mentioned in a recent roundup. The other is Julia Blackburn, whose Dreaming The Karoo (Jonathan Cape) tells of her journey to the Karoo region of South Africa, to explore the ancestral lands that once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam. In a review for The New Statesman, Lucy Hughes-Hallett concludes that Blackburn “works a miracle. In this book dead people talk in a dead language, describing a culture and way of life which is also dead, and yet, thanks to… Blackburn’s tactful, beautifully-framed extrapolations, those dead come before us and speak.”