Dinner of Herbs by Carla Grissmann. (Arcadia, £10.99)

CARLA Grissmann, American by birth and now in her early 70s, divides her time between London and Afghanistan.

This travelogue is about the year she spent in the early 1960s living with a family in a remote village in Anatolia, central Turkey.

For the village, time seems to have stood still, and the changes of the 20th Century seem to have passed them by.

Grissmann became a friend to this tight-knit community, and describes a people on the cusp of change, whose timeless rituals and way of life are about to be altered forever by the modern world.