Goat: A Story of Kashmir and Notting Hill [Paperback]

"'Hardy writes like a dream... Very funny, inspirational and containing just about all you ever wanted to know about pashmina' William Allendale 'The strength of her storyline is complemented by her evocative prose, sensitively written with humour and pathos' Victoria Schofield"

"The strength of her storyline is complemented by her evocative prose, sensitively written with humour and pathos."

This is a story about goat hair, gathered from herds that graze among the high-altitude monasteries of Little Tibet, woven in villages near the Kashmiri border with Pakistan, and sold to the ladies-who-lunch of London's Notting Hill. It is also the story of a beautiful valley with some ugly secrets. A journalist based in India, Justine Hardy started trading pashmina shawls as a way of raising money to support an education programme in some of Delhi's slum areas. In setting up the company she spent time living among the market dyers in the polluted inner city of Delhi, in villages in the fighting zones of Kashmir, on the lakes beyond Srinagar, and in and out of design houses and the scented drawing-rooms of wealthy London. In Delhi the money from the shawls was turned into primary education for beggar children; in Kashmir, over the flight of the pashmina looms, stories began to be told of the hundreds of children who disappear each year, perhaps into terrorist camps where they are trained to become killers. Goat is an unusual story of shawls and missing children, of cappuccino bars in London and hostages in Kashmir.

Justine Hardy's first book, The Ochre Border, was about the reopening of the Tibetan frontier-lands. Her second, Scoop-Wallah, the story of life on an Indian newspaper in Delhi, was short-listed for the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award in 2000. She lives in London and Delhi.