Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah and over 1.5 million other books are available for Amazon Kindle . Learn more


or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
Trade in Yours
For a £0.55 Gift Card
Trade in
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Colour:
Image not available

 
Start reading Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Landfalls [Paperback]

Tim Mackintosh-Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £9.99
Price: £6.89 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £3.10 (31%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Only 3 left in stock (more on the way).
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon. Gift-wrap available.
Want delivery by Thursday, 23 May? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition £5.99  
Hardcover £16.00  
Paperback £6.89  
Trade In this Item for up to £0.55
Trade in Landfalls for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.55, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Learn more

Book Description

26 May 2011

For Ibn Batuttah of Tangier, being medieval didn't mean sitting at home waiting for renaissances, enlightenments and easyJet. It meant travelling the known world to its limits.


 


Seven centuries on, Tim Mackintosh-Smith's passionate pursuit of the fourteenth-century traveller takes him to landfalls in remote tropical islands, torrid Indian Ocean ports and dusty towns on the shores of the Saharan sand-sea. His zigzag itinerary across time and space leads from Zanzibar to the Alhambra (via the Maldives, Sri Lanka, China, Mauritania and Guinea) and to a climactic conclusion to his quest for the man he calls 'IB' - a man who out-travelled Marco Polo by a factor of three, who spent his days with saints and sultans and his nights with an intercontinental string of slave-concubines.


 


Tim's journey is a search for survivals from IB's world - material, human, spiritual, edible - however, when your fellow traveller has a 700-year head start, familiar notions don't always work.


 


Frequently Bought Together

Landfalls + The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah + Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah
Price For All Three: £21.36

Buy the selected items together


Product details

  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: John Murray; Reprint edition (26 May 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0719567785
  • ISBN-13: 978-0719567780
  • Product Dimensions: 13 x 2.5 x 19.7 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 219,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Product Description

Review

'Landfalls is a beautifully written account of Islamic life and culture in the 21st century. Whether he is looking for proof of demons off the coast of an island in the Maldives or indulging in a delirious dance to the sound of an ancient Guinean musical instrument, his book is a joyous celebration of cultural diversity'

(Sunday Times )

'Well paced, erudite, amusing . . . almost always fascinating . . . Landfalls proves that reports of the death of the travel book are premature. Far from it. With its mix of literary adventure, biography and autobiography, this book suggests that, in the right hands, the genre can be as flexible, energetic and rewarding as ever'

(Literary Review )

'Captivating'

(Scotsman )

'In this exquisitiely written volume, Mackintosh-Smith establishes himself as a pre-eminent travel writer of his generation, comparable to an earlier D. H. Lawrence of Eric Newby'

(Toronto Globe and Mail )

'The long-awaited and dazzling conclusion to the Tim Mackintosh-Smith trilogy'

(Country Life )

'Mackintosh-Smith's third and final volume in the series . . . is as delightful as the first two. What draws readers in is his enthusiasm and wonder . . . Another fantastic voyage of two distinctive travel writers. Recommended for those interested in travel, history and Middle East study areas'

(Library Journal )

'An entertaining and learned travelling companion. And, if he persuades more people to read Ibn Battutah, so much the better'

(TLS )

'Mackintosh-Smith's zesty travelogue is packed with eccentric characters and anecdote'

(FT )

'Landfalls marks the dazzling conclusion to a trilogy'

(Middle East )

About the Author

Tim Mackintosh-Smith studied Classical Arabic at Oxford. At the age of 21, he headed east for the real Arabia. For the past 17 years, he has lived in the Yemeni capital, San`a - a place which has missed out on many of the more awful aspects of the post medieval period. His first book, Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, won the 1998 Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award and his next book Travels with a Tangerine was critically acclaimed.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Customer Reviews

4 star
0
3 star
0
2 star
0
1 star
0
5.0 out of 5 stars
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Quirky but highly entertaining 15 Dec 2010
By D. P. Mankin TOP 1000 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I rarely read travel books but having read several reviews of this one I decided to take the plunge. And what a rewarding journey it has been (I now have the second in the trilogy and thus am reading the books backwards not that it really matters!). Tim Mackintosh-Smith has the canny knack of blending two genres: history and travelogue. He does this in a marevellously entertaining yet erudite manner, and, perhaps importantly, with considerable humour. This account of the journeys of the 14th century Ibn Batuttah of Tangier makes for a magical read. I loved it!
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Travels on the Edge of Islam 24 Mar 2011
Format:Hardcover
Landfalls is the third in Tim Mackintosh-Smith's trilogy of books following in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah, the well-traveled 14th-century man about the Islamic world--and perhaps his best book yet. By now, Mackintosh-Smith is a seasoned traveler and deeply read Ibn Battutah connoisseur, and a sharp, observant and delightful writer. After trailing IB, as he calls Ibn Battutah, across North Africa, the Middle East and India in Travels with a Tangerine and The Hall of a Thousand Columns, he ventures with IB here to the edges of the classical Islamic world: east Africa, the Indian Ocean, China and West Africa.

Mackintosh-Smith roams from Tanzania, which is as far down the east coast of Africa as Islam spread by the 1300s (and today, for that matter), to the Maldives, those idyllic looking islands in the Indian Ocean that had just fallen under the sway of Islam as IB landed by ship. Then it's off to Sri Lanka, where a beleaguered Muslim minority still lingers through the depredations of that country's longstanding civil strife between Tamils and Sinhalese, and as far east as China, where Muslims now (as then) barely have a toe-hold. In the end, he returns like IB to West Africa, where IB spent his last journeying days, and to Spain, as the reconquista was pushing the last remnants of the golden age of Islam out of the Iberian peninsula and back to the shores of Africa.

All along, Mackintosh-Smith seeks tangible remnants of IB or of IB's time and acquaintances, and surprisingly often finds them, or at least close enough to the real thing. There are mosques that IB must have attended, roads that he might have traveled. Then there's the time he manages to attend a Manding religious ceremony in Guinea--a Naipaulesque nightmare of a country. He's suddenly sitting with IB, who wrote about the same ceremony some 650 years before, in pretty much the exact same place. It's a startling convergence of time and space, and one that Mackintosh-Smith conveys in sparkling prose that brings it indelibly alive.

Along the way, Mackintosh-Smith regales us with stories of IB, whose famous book of travels he knows inside out not only from speaking Arabic but from having all but memorized extended passages. IB was infamous for collecting royals: if he were alive today, Mackintosh-Smith jests, he'd work a tabloid on the royalty beat. As an exotic Westerner in whatever place he lands, he is soon fawning over local potentates, and carefully planning how he will touch the various sultans for a bit of gold while he's at it--and spreading his genes via multiple marriages and liaisons to boot. IB, as Mackintosh-Smith portrays him, is utterly wily--after all, how otherwise could he have survived some 30 years of traveling the known world in the mid-1300s and come back to tell the tale?

Mostly Mackintosh-Smith is traveling alone, but occasionally his traveling companion, the artist Martin Yeoman, tags along, providing the deft line drawings that are sprinkled through the book. Mackintosh-Smith likes the company, and he gleefully reports the puns they trade. Still, the storytelling in Landfalls is best when Mackintosh-Smith is alone; it makes him a more careful observer, forced to mix with the locals.

Normally I trot quickly through a good travel book, but with Landfalls I took my time, savoring each page. Mackintosh-Smith's writing is a joy to read; he's a writer who's in love with words. (More than a few I'd never run across before, but like reading Patrick Leigh-Fermor, I consider it a free lesson to have to thumb through my dictionary now and again.)

Landfalls stands alone perfectly well: you don't need to have read the first two books to appreciate or understand anything in this one. Mackintosh-Smith has thought long and hard about IB and the ways that IB's world is still with us today. This is the most erudite, masterful, amusing, and enlightening book I've read in years, and deserves a wide audience, especially in this age of very one-dimensional portrayals of Islam.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Ibn Batutta comes to life 3 Sep 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Yet another fascinating book from Tim Mackintosh Smith. His books following the steps of Ibn Batutta are amongst the most fascinating travel/historical books I have ever read.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?   Let us know
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 

Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Feedback


Amazon.co.uk Privacy Statement Amazon.co.uk Delivery Information Amazon.co.uk Returns & Exchanges