Review
"An intrepid traveller who also writes beautifully, with wit and erudition."-"Spectator"
Book Description
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award
Product Description
Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron set off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to Tibet, starting from a tropical paradise near the Burmese border to the windswept wastes of the Gobi desert and the far end of the Great Wall. What Thubron reveals is an astonishing diversity, a land whose still unmeasured resources strain to meet an awesome demand, and an ancient people still reeling from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. (20030923)
About the Author
Colin Thubron was born in London in 1939. His earliest travel books were about the Middle East and include Mirror to Damascus and Jerusalem. In the last of the Brezhnev years he explored Western Russia by car and wrote Among the Russians. Later, a gruelling journey took him to some of the remotest regions of China for his Behind the Wall, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award. Eight years later Thubron wrote The Lost Heart of Asia, which describes his travels through Central Asia. In Siberia chronicles his extensive journey through the region mostly by boat and bus. Thubron has also been numbered among 'the current masters of the short novel' (TLS), and called 'one of our most compelling contemporary novelists' (Independent). His fiction includes Falling, Emperor, A Cruel Madness, Turning Back the Sun and Distance. His most recent travel book in Vintage is To the Last City. (20030609)
