Colin Thubron's travel writing books standing on a shelf to show spines, with The Amur River turned to display its cover, alongside a small globe.

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Reading lists

Where to start reading Colin Thubron’s travel writing

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7 travel writers you need to know

(Vintage Voyages)

Shadow of the Silk Road

VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

It is hard to think of a better travel book written this century

A beautiful and profound travel book

A masterpiece of travel writing ... a classic

Thubron is a very hardy traveller, and a very fine writer...[it is] a book of exceptional erudition, adventure and elegance

A poetic volume - interesting, shocking and deeply engaging, the work of a mature writer at the top of his game

Impresses with its scholarship and literary craft

He effortlessly interweaves the present with the fast-disappearing past, and reminds even the well-travelled how much we still have to learn about our planet...Thubron takes us on a fascinating journey that shows that travel writing at its best can still approach literature and can still educate

Colin Thubron is the master of classic travel writing, and a previous winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled all over Russia in an ancient Morris Marina - pursued at every stage by the KGB. From these early experiences developed his travel books: Among the Russians, Behind the Wall, The Lost Heart of Asia and In Siberia (all available in Vintage). So great is his dedication to travelling in Russia and China, that he has learned Russian and Mandarin in order to be able to speak to ordinary people en route. 
 
Colin Thubron is also a prize-winning novelist - but his travel books have a much higher profile and command much greater sales than his fiction. He lives in West London.

Colin Thurbon’s beautiful prose unfolds along the Silk Road, unearthing a richly layered past on his most ambitious journey. 
 
 On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. A magnificent account of an ancient world in modern ferment, Thubron covers over 7000 miles in eight months enduring a near-miss with a drunk-driver, incarceration in a Chinese cell, and undergoing root canal treatment without anaesthetic, along the way. 
 
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

Mirror To Damascus

50th Anniversary Edition

A 50th anniversary edition of Colin Thubron's celebrated first book, a portrait of Syria's capital city, with a new introduction by the author

One of the oldest, most mysterious and fascinating cities in the world has found a worthy biographer: a rare event and one not to be missed

One of the most subtly beautiful books about a city I have ever read

Colin Thubron writes in a classical style of grave beauty, with an intense feeling for place and people

From the earliest legend to the latest coup, Mirror to Damascus reflects every discoverable facet of the city... a quite exceptional travel writer

One of the great merits of Mr Thubron's admirable book is that he balances this tribute to a place of which he is clearly very fond with the harsh facts of history... he was always moved by the best motives - curiosity and affection

Mr Thubron is a man of singular enterprise, and a writer of remarkable distinction. Surely Damascus was never sacked to better purpose

A passionate, enchanted and highly intellectual experience, both for author and reader

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. He first visited Syria in 1965 and his portrait of its capital city, Mirror to Damascus, was published to critical acclaim in 1967. He has also written about Lebanon, Cyprus and Russia. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier), Shadow of the Silk Road and To a Mountain in Tibet. Colin Thubron was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2010 to 2017.

A 50th anniversary edition of Colin Thubron's celebrated first book, a portrait of Syria's capital city, with a new introduction by the author. 
 
Described by the author as simply 'a work of love', Mirror to Damascus provides a rich and fascinating history of Damascus from the Amorites of the Bible to the revolution of 1966, and is also a charming and witty personal record of an extraordinary city. 
 
 In explaining how modern Damascus is rooted in immemorial layers of culture and tradition, Colin Thubron explores the historical, artistic, social and religious inheritance of its people. Along the way, he shares unforgettable stories about the enterprising travellers of bygone days. 
 
 Mirror to Damascus is a unique portrait of a city now obscured by recent upheavals, by one of the most indefatigable and popular of travel writers.

Night of Fire

The breathtaking, emotionally wrenching new novel from the award-winning novelist and travel writer, Colin Thubron

Thubron returns with what might be his masterpiece… Thubron’s prose shines a penetrating light on the nature of memory and being human. Sublime.

An engrossing, unsettling and brutally beautiful masterpiece.

Each life story…is told with all this writer’s irresistible narrative gift

Medicine owes an equal debt of gratitude to him for evoking a journey through the brain with the same adventurous and beguiled spirit as he might a rainforest or ancient city… With the ease of a master craftsman he makes up new words…lovingly evokes the extraordinary places he has passed through… This outstanding novel confirms that there is nowhere Thubron fears to tread.

His calm, contemplative tone and his mastery of imagery…are on full display here.

The novel impresses with its literary craft and ambition.

A deeply personal, characteristically ambitious book.

A compelling, lyrical tale of how a single spark unravels seven entwined lives.

Thubron has written a novel which is at once disturbing and consoling. It makes you both think and feel at the same time, which is perhaps what the best fiction does more surely than any other art form.

Thubron’s prose is, of course, finely crafted. He veers in style between lyrical heights… Night of Fire could best be described as a poetic and erudite meditation on the journey of life.

[It is] beautifully written, as vivid as Thubron’s striking travel writing… Night of Fire fuses realism with the structure of a modern fable.

By [one] of the most brilliant writers of our day... Night of Fire evokes the emotions of seven tenants, plus their landlord, when their apartment house is burnt down

Thubron’s ability to span that geographical, cultural and philosophical range is just one remarkable element of this profound and exquisite novel

Ambitious but accomplished, Night Of Fire is a meditation on memory, mortality and what makes us who we are. Thubron’s readiness to deal with profound questions is impressive and the novel leaves a lasting trace.

Set in a house that’s burning to the ground… It a series of poignant, interlocked vignettes, Thubron deftly sketches the lives of the doomed inhabitants, evoking powerful images of place, of loss and shared humanity.

It began with a spark... 
 
A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and a photographer. Their landlord's relationship to them is both intimate and shadowy. At times he shares their obsessions and memories. He will also share their fate. 
 
The passions of these individuals reach beyond the dying house that holds them. One recalls a lonely childhood, another the cremation grounds of India, another an African refugee camp. But will their stories be consumed forever by the flames?

Falling

'This is fiction of the highest quality - a story that aims high, risks everything and haunts' Mail on Sunday--

He writes with impressive directness and simplicity at moments of passion-One is aware of the compassionate intelligence that is discreetly but continuously at work in this book

Impeccably crafted and beautifully written-many books which are highly enjoyable in the reading leave no imprint on the imagination. This one does

Mark Swabey, a provincial journalist, is serving a prison sentence in connection with the death of Clara the Swallow, a circus acrobat with whom he fell in love. And the grief-stricken Swabey looks back on their brief affair, the exact nature of his responsibility for Clara's death is movingly revealed-every sentence is informed by the most intense anguish'

Thubron weaves a skilful, poignant story of love and loss, and also reinvents the myth of the Fall-This novel is above all celebratory. It trumpets the right to walk out on the high wire, to love dangerously and hopelessly - even if death (real or metaphorical) is the price

Colin Thubron was born in London in 1939.  He left publishing to travel - mainly in Asia and North Africa, where he made documentary films which were shown on BBC and world television. Afterwards, he returned to the Middle East, and wrote five books on the Area. In 1984, the Book Marketing Council nominated him one of the twenty best contemporary writers on travel.

From the crowd below a journalist watches, as a circus girl performs her strangely daring trapeze act, and is captivated by her beauty, outrageous costumes and exotic make-up in such a way that he finds himself falling helplessly in love with her. But it is from a prison cell that the journalist remembers what happened - a prison like a microcosm of the world outside, where there are those who risk, and those who are self-incarcerated. Exploring the courage to aim beyond human limitation, Falling is an intensely moving story of love and loss.

Journey Into Cyprus

'He is the most admirable of guides, deeply versed in the rich history and archaeology of the island, delighting in the legends' - Sunday Telegraph

Thubron writes very well indeed... He carries with him the talisman of erudition combined with intuition

Thubron knows the real Cypriots... He evinces a never unsympathetic observation and a respect for the incongruous that put him in the category of Kinglake and Edward Lear

Purchased by blistered and bleeding feet, this picture is extraordinarily detailed and vivid... An accomplished linguist and historian, his passionate concern for antiquity in all its aspects - mythological, architectural, conceptual - lends weight and warmth to every chapter

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road (all available in Vintage). In 2010 Colin Thubron became President the Royal Society of Literature.

Cyprus, spring 1972. Tensions are rising between the Greek South and the Turkish North. Within two years, the country will become divided. 
 
It is at this distinctive time in history British travel writer Colin Thubron embarks on a 600 mile trek across the country. Moving from Greek villages to Turkish towns, the author of Shadow of the Silk Road and Night of Fire provides a profound look into the people of Cyprus – from Orthodox monks to wedding parties to peasant families – against the landscape of a beautiful Mediterranean island on the eve of chaos and tragedy. A remarkable quest rich in literature, classics and architecture, Journey Into Cyprus ingeniously intertwines the history and politics of Cyprus and its mythical past with the tumultuous present – from the master of travel books and writing, Colin Thubron. 
 
‘An accomplished linguist and historian, his passionate concern for antiquity in all its aspects - mythological, architectural, conceptual - lends weight and warmth to every chapter’ Financial Times

To a Mountain in Tibet

Given that Thubron has shown himself over a lifetime's work to be our finest, is seems fitting that what is as much memoir as travel book should have as its setting the greatest spiritual pilgrimage the East has to offer

A master class in travel writing that's also infused with the author's "shadowy melancholy" of ageing and grief...Thubron showcases here all the skills that have earned him the champion's belt as Britain's best living travel writer

Exquisitely written, To a Mountain in Tibet is not just a travelogue; it amounts to a heart-felt hosanna to the travails of walking... Colin Thubron takes us back to the days of exploration when the going was rough. To a Mountain in Tibet, a matchless work of literary travel, confirms Thubron as a wise and discriminate prospector in the affairs of man

Daring and brilliant. Thubron has crafted a book which beautifully describes one man's experience of loss, familial love, and even the state of mortal indeterminacy itself - how we all keep our memories, consoled and bewildered by turns, the sun on our faces, and the birds carrying above

This is a bold and brave journey, an elegiac book by a master of prose at the height of his powers

The writing glitters. Thubron has always been a travel-writing stylist, in the lyrical mould of Patrick Leigh Fermor, but with the quartz-like eye of Freya Stark

As he makes the arduous ritual circle of Kailas, the rocks and gullies come alive with their sacred meanings and give us an understanding of faiths held with a passion unfamiliar in the West. His profound, elegant and fascinating little book is much weightier than it appears.

Thubron's books celebrate the terrible, pitiful, beautiful, human condition ... To a Mountain in Tibet offers no redemption and no conclusion. Instead, it is an elegy for everything that makes us human

The most profound and revealing thing [Thubron] has ever written

This is not only a book about Tibet; it is a book about Colin Thubron and much the richer for that

The subject matter - gloomy, perhaps, in other hands - shines in Thubron's beautiful prose

Thubron's descriptive writing is as dazzling as the scenery. His scholarship on the area's religious and political history is enthralling

It could have been written for radio in how vividly it makes you see pictures, hear sounds, notice the worn trainers on the man who joined them for part of the trek, catch the tap of the sherpa's staff.  It sounds like a conversation with the listener's imagination

With a landscape that easily provokes superlatives or just stupefied wonder, and a culture steeped in esoteric beliefs, Tibet needs a writer of Thubron's caliber to do it justice

He describes both landscapes and humans in sharp poetic detail and provides a deceptively simple account of both the inner and outer journey.

In an elegiac mood and powerful prose. Thubron considers the significance of his journey, the poetry and politics of the region, and the bleak landscapes that reflect solitude

An utterly absorbing read... An elegiac meditation on life, death, family and mortality. Beautiful

Thubron is an impressive prose stylist..he writes with great elegiac precision

It's a pleasure to follow Colin Thubron's hesitant pilgrimage ... the last of the great post-war British travel writers

Amid the desolation there is a beauty that comes not only from the things that Thubron chooses to describe but from the way in which he describes them

What Thubron provides in his inimitable way is an account of both fellow pilgrimsand himself

Colin Thurbron's ode to a mystical mountain in Tibet... Not to be missed

This latest travelogue confirms Colin Thubron as one of the greatest contemporary travel writers

I am haunted by its spare simplicity and beauty

His measures prose matches the region's stark beauty. Refreshing

This pure artist of the voyage looks back backwards and within, to his late mother and his childhood, as well as up to the Himalayan peaks and peoples that he sumptuously evokes

[An] elegiac account of high-altitude piety...he's still one of the best in the business

An absolutely terrific book. Thubron has perfect pitch. He uses the minimum of words to maximum effect. His descriptions are fresh and acute and he can convey atmosphere and emotion on the head of a pin. The journey to Mount Kailash is enthralling and he keeps the reader right beside him every inch of the way

Punchy, evocative... It is a dangerous journey up to 18,000ft, where Thubron, who is mourning his mother, is hit by altitude sickness

Abook which beautifully describes one man's experience  of loss and familial love

[Thubron] skilfully balances his poetic descriptions of the land and its subtle, shifting colours with human stuff - observations of his fellow travellers, encounters and personal anecdotes, snippets of history and rather interesting accounts of Tantric Buddhism, with its swirling pantheon of blue-faced demons, bodhisattvas, gods and goddesses... Thubron has recently buried his last living relative and his grieving gives depth and weight to his meditations on Tibetan Buddhism

This is a superb book from a writer who over his lifetime has shown himself to be our finest modern chronicler of Asia

The keenest-eyed, least self-absorbed, of literary travellers, Colin Thubron writes with a pin-point elegance and economy that directs your gaze to a place and its people, rather than to the author's foibles... His tales of seekers, refugees and mystics richly sketch the background of Tibetan history and Buddhist belief. Above all, his lean and supple prose draws meaning and moment from every encounter. "To the pilgrims, there are no mute stones" - and not to their ultra-observant companion

His book is interspersed with poignant passages about his late parents and sister, who died in an avalanche when he was 23. Thubron also reveals some cultural surprises.

Making a lyrical hymn out of travel writing, Thubron's evocative pilgrimage is typically poised yet, triggered by the death of his mother, also unusually personal

Thubron's writing is as spectacular as his surroundings so he therefore makes you feel as though you are treading the path with him

[Thubron]  doesn't just walk into the higher reaches of the Himalyas but explores his own reaches of eternity as well as the more outer regions of Buddhism and Hinduism

Deploying a poetic blend of travel and memoir, Thubron uses Buddhism to inform reflections on the cycles of life and the meaning of suffering... it is an elegy for everything that makes us human

Reflections of the wheel of life are sensitively handled and the writing is as beautiful as ever

A new Travel Thubron is always to be savoured, but there was something valedictory and elegiac about this

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road (all available in Vintage). In 2010 Colin Thubron became President the Royal Society of Literature.

**TOP TEN BESTSELLER** 
 
'I would rather read Colin Thubron than any other travel writer alive' John Simpson 
 
 Mount Kailas is the most sacred of the world's mountains - holy to one fifth of humanity. Isolated beyond the central Himalayas, its summit has never been scaled, but for centuries the mountain has been ritually circled by Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims. 
 
 Colin Thubron joins these pilgrims, after an arduous trek from Nepal, through the high passes of Tibet, to the magical lakes beneath the slopes of Kailas itself. He talks to secluded villagers and to monks in their decaying monasteries; he tells the stories of exiles and of eccentric explorers from the West. 
 
 Yet he is also walking on a pilgrimage of his own. Having recently witnessed the death of the last of his family, his trek around the great mountain awakes an inner landscape of love and grief, restoring precious fragments of his own past.

Distance

A highly wrought, tautly written, thought-provoking novel exploring the human mind and the human memory..

This is a cracking read...Character and situation are evoked with masterful economy of language, and the taut, crisp sentences impart a hypnotic quality, as though it were a dream swiftly noted down on waking, before it fades

The novel's structure makes arresting use of a Metaphysical-like conceit linking the macrocosm and the microcosm - eternity and mortality, black holes and blank memories, dying stars and dead mothers - while the prose itself is admirably short on pretension and subtle in its emotional layering. Thubron's skill as a travel writer comes to the fore in the evocation of the earth's exotic places, dangerous heights and dark depths, the latter echoing the murky terrain of Edward's mind

The writing is spare and unfussy, and in the book's closing stages the basic thriller mechanism - what horrible secret lurks in memory's locked attic? - is screwed tighter with each page

Colin Thubron was born in London in 1939. He left publishing to travel - mainly in Asia and North Africa, where he made documentary films which were shown on BBC and world television. Afterwards, he returned to the Middle East, and wrote five books on the Area. In 1984, the Book Marketing Council nominated him one of the twenty best contemporary writers on travel.

Edward has lost his short term-memory. He hopes it will return when he sees the cottage in which he lives. He recognizes his overcoat on the hook, his books, the double bed. The mystery however, is Naomi. Edward has no recollection of who she is or why she has left him a love letter. 
 
With Thubron's customary clarity he draws a bleak, amnesiac world in which a young man must face again old griefs and linger 'like a coward, just this side of knowing'. On the other side, the memory of a destructive, obsessive relationship looms.

The Hills Of Adonis

An extraordinary adventure into the heart of Lebanon by the master of literary travel writing; 'Colin Thubron is in a class of his own' (Scotsman).

He has the mind of a scholar, uses language like a poet and has written a lovely mosaic of a book

Adventurous, observant, modest, poetical, Mr Thubron is a traveller after one's own heart

For four months and five hundred miles Colin Thubron walked the mountains of Lebanon, following tracks and rivers. His journey was not only a survey of a remarkable country, but a quest for the gods and divinities who held the secrets of death and rebirth in the land's ancient cults. 
 
He visited almost every place of cultural importance, and lived with the people along his way, recording a country of outstanding natural scenery, rich with a unique medley of races and religions. 
 
The Hills of Adonis is both a travel book and a personal journal; for the quest is the search for meaning, a reflection on faith and reason and a poem on the joy and complexity of living.

From the Baltic to the Caucasus

Among the Russians

'A magnificent achievement' - Nikolai Tolstoy, The Times

The Soviet Union is seen through a glass brightly... What makes the book so readable is Thubron's combination of an artist's aesthetic sensitivity with the literary craftsmanship to convey it. He sees things with the freshness of an innocent and the erudition of a scholar

Superb... one of the best books on Russia to appear in years

Travel writing has never been more provocative, profound or poetic

The Thubron approach to travelling has an integrity that belongs to another age. And this author's way with words gives his books a value far transcending their topical interest; it is safe to predict they will be read a century hence

The perfect guide to one of the world’s most enigmatic cultures

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road. His most recent book is To a Mountain in Tibet (all available in Vintage). In 2010 Colin Thubron became President the Royal Society of Literature.

'A magnificent achievement' Nikolai Tolstoy, The Times 
 
Among the Russians is a marvellous account of a solitary journey by car from St. Petersburg and the Baltic States south to Georgia and Armenia. A gifted writer and intrepid traveller, Thubron grapples with the complexities of Russian identity and relays his extraordinary journey in characteristically lyrical style. This is an enthralling and revealing account of the habits and idiosyncrasies of a fascinating nation along with a sharp and insightful social commentary of Russian life. 
 
'Superb... one of the best books on Russia to appear in years' New York Times

In Siberia

'If there were a Nobel Prize for travel writing, Thubron should win it' - Daily Mail

I have never made it as far as Siberia, but reading this book makes me feel as if I have actually been there. Thubron weaves his own observations beautifully with the history of this part of the world

Colin Thubron is in a class of his own in [having] a literary talent for reportage which is both crisp and lyrical

Captivating: a passionately engaged portrait of one of the earth's most mysterious regions...confirms Thubron's place in the pantheon of the writing greats

There are currently few writers and fewer books capable of transporting a reader to another place as beautifully as Thubron does in this work. It is simply superb

A profound meditation on how some of the great upheavals of this century touched ordinary lives

'One of the finest books about contemporary Russia' Observer 
 
This is the account of Thubron's 15,000-mile journey through an astonishing country - one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth. He journeyed by train, river and truck among the people most damaged by the breakup of the Soviet Union, traveling among Buddhists and animists, radical Christian sects, reactionary Communists and the remnants of a so-call Jewish state; from the site of the last Czar's murder and Rasputin's village, to the ice-bound graves of ancient Sythians, to Baikal, deepest and oldest of the world's lakes. 
 
 It is the story of a people moving through the ruins of Communism into more private, diverse and often stranger worlds. 
 
'If there were a Nobel Prize for travel writing, Thubron should win it' Daily Mail

A Journey Through China

Behind The Wall

Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

An achievement of great and lasting brilliance

This transcendentally gifted writer is, of course, one of the two or three best living travel writers

A travel book which tells us more about this strange, sometimes terrible region and its people than a library of more pretentious works

An intrepid traveller, who also writes beautifully, with wit and erudition... The result is a rare first-hand account of a country seen through the eyes of one who has experienced what he describes and who is in a position to understand what he sees... He penetrates where most would believe it is impossible for a foreigner to go

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier), Shadow of the Silk Road and, more recently, Journey Into Cyprus (all available in Vintage). In 2010 Colin Thubron became President the Royal Society of Literature.

A powerful unforgettable journey through China with one of our greatest travel writers. 
 
'An achievement of great and lasting brilliance' Patrick Leigh Fermor 
 
Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron set off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to the borders of Burma. He travelled through the wind-swept wastes of the Gobi desert and finished at 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.

The Lost Heart of Asia

'I would rather read Colin Thubron than any other travel writer alive on central Asia' - John Simpson, Daily Telegraph

Thubron's journey takes him through a spectacular, talismanic geography of desert and mountain... a whole glittering, terrible and romantic history lies abandoned along with thoughts of more prosperous times... Thubon's grasp of this fantastical past is impeccable, and he weaves its mysteries with modern images into a dazzling embroidery

Thubron writes with an originality and vividness that few contemporary authors can match

Although the heroic age of travellers in Central Asia has gone for ever, this book will still deserve, for the intense beauty of its pose and the observant clarity of its visions, to stand alongside the best of those classic travel writings of the past

This book is a masterpiece of travel writing... in plain English, it's a classic

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), In Siberia (Prix Bouvier), Shadow of the Silk Road and To a Mountain in Tibet (all available in Vintage). In 2010 Colin Thubron became President the Royal Society of Literature.

Discover Colin Thubron's journey through central asia in the wake of the fall of the iron curtain. 
 
Thubron travelled throughout Central Asia in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union and documented the widespread social upheaval in a region reeling from political change. Thubron is an inspirational writer, intrepid traveller and insightful observer and his The Lost Heart of Asia is an outstanding guide to the history, people and culture of a vast region resonating with history and politics. 
 
'Thubron's journey takes him through a spectacular, talismanic geography of desert and mountain... and he weaves its mysteries with modern images into a dazzling embroidery' The Times

Colin Thubron has been described as 'one of the two or three best living travel writers, in some ways probably the best' - Independent

It is hard to think of a better travel book written this century

Shadow of the Silk Road is a work of boundless riches. Every paragraph carries a captivating phrase...offering up an understanding of our world today that is as immediate as tomorrow's news, yet infinitely profound

One of Thubron's great strengths is his compassion...his shimmering prose creates a wonderful book, so multilayered that, when I reached the end, I wanted to read it all over again

Rich in humour, compassion and history, another confirmation, if any more were needed, that Thubron is the pre-eminent travel writer of his generation

A poetic volume - interesting, shocking and deeply engaging, the work of a mature writer at the top of his game

Thubron is a very hardy traveller, and a very fine writer...[it is] a book of exceptional erudition, adventure and elegance

Thubron makes his way with an appealing blend of self-doubt and erudition; he is willing, he is patient,; he knows he cannot resolve but he can attempt to decipher.... He is the reliable storyteller we needed in place of Marco Polo. His stock in trade makes him invaluable to us

An exquisitely written work of great profundity

Shadow of the Silk Road is an astonishing achievement - both the journey and the book. Mr Thubron's tenacity, endurance, stamina and erudition metamorphose into exquisite prose. This is harder to achieve than one might think and can only be the result of huge effort and skill

To those of us addicted to the thrill of travel, that unique and irresistible rush induced by journeying into the unknown, Colin Thubron is God....his socio-political savvy is impeccable, his local knowledge faultless...What a journey, what a book

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier), Shadow of the Silk Road and To a Mountain in Tibet (all available in Vintage). In 2010 Colin Thubron became President the Royal Society of Literature.

A journey along the greatest land route on earth, from the master of travel writing Colin Thubron 
 
 On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. Covering over 7000 miles in eight months Thubron recounts extraordinary adventures - a near-miss with a drunk-driver, incarceration in a Chinese cell during the SARS epidemic, undergoing root canal treatment without anaesthetic in Iran - in inimitable prose. Shadow of the Silk Road is about Asia today; a magnificent account of an ancient world in modern ferment. 
 
 'It is hard to think of a better travel book written this century' Times 
 
'Thubron is the pre-eminent travel writer of his generation' Sunday Telegraph

A Cruel Madness

'As compelling as a thriller - Mr Thubron has hit that most disturbing target, the target of imaginative truth' Nina Bawden, Daily Telegraph

A nightmare vision of emotional instability and insanity... If Van Gogh or Munch had been novelists, or Strindberg a painter, they would have created similar mental landscapes... A work of fiction whose hold on the intellect is as strong as its grip on the senses: that sounds, looks, tastes and smells like a minor masterpiece

Brilliant... A Cruel Madness brings to mind other novels set in the microcosmic world of a hospital, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

With terrifying vividness, Mr Thubron creates a phantasmagoric world

Colin Thubron conjures up, within a tight narrative, a whole persuasive world - not just the physical setting of the hospital, but the tortuous and paradoxical internal world of the warped mind

When a part-time worker in a mental hospital meets his old girlfriend inside he is not sure at first is she is a patient. Their reunion is haunted and haunting, and from the memory of their past affair there unfolds a labyrinth which darkens from romantic obsession to feelings deeper and more disturbing. Colin Thubron creates a world of passion, delusion, and reality mingling with unreality, pervaded by an all-consuming sense of longing and of loss.

To The Last City

'Colin Thubron's voice is unique: once heard, difficult to forget' Anita Brookner

One of our most compelling contemporary novelists

Colin Thubron's voice is unique: once heard, difficult to forget

A tense, precarious achievement, brilliantly evoking a dangerous journey

It is the sharpness of the topography that brings this book to life, the handling of the characters is equally impressive... Thubron has captured, with a vividness that few could match...the charms of a journey into the unknown

Colin Thubron seems to be a writer undaunted by immensity, either of place or plot... To the Last City is haunting and passionate and, above all, magnificently fearless

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road (all available in Vintage). In 2010 Colin Thubron became President of the Royal Society of Literature.

To the Last City is set deep in the Peruvian Andes, where five ill-prepared travellers - men and women with different values, temperaments and motives - find themselves trekking through one of the most exacting and beautiful regions on earth. 
 
It is a journey which may temper or destroy them. They confront not only their relationships with one another, but also the enigmas of the country's past, the dangers of its present, and the limitations of their own minds and bodies. The 'lost city' of their destination is Vilcabamba, last refuge of the Inca against the Spaniards, subsumed by jungle for four hundred years. 
 
In this brilliant exploration of the psychological challenges of travelling, set within the exotic jungle of South America, Colin Thubron for the first time joins his highly acclaimed talents as a travel writer with his gifts as a novelist.

Emperor

'An astonishingly imaginative recreation' Jan Morris, The Times

Colin Thubron has chosen to present his vividly original concept of Constantine as a mosaic of fragments from letters, written orders, jottings from supposed journals of the emperor and his train and, most revealing of all, extracts from the correspondence of his lovely, tragic, inaccessible wife, Fausta

It is a stylish, sensitive exploration of complex people in an era of complexities, and creates vividly the climate of an over-ripe civilisation falling into self-questioning

'Legionaries and their commanders, frigid empress and frivolous lady-in-waiting, and, above all, the ambitious, domineering, but also self-tormenting and restlessly questioning Constantine - all come vividly to life and persuade the reader that he is their contemporary.'

Colin Thubron was born in 1939, and worked in publishing before travelling in North Africa, the Middle East, Russia and China.

The Emperor Constantine crosses the Alps at the head of a great army from the Rhineland in AD 312, and marches south to take Rome from the tyrant Maxentius. As he lays siege to the city of Verona, Constantine waits for the arrival of his wife, Fausta - his enemy's sister - whose cool detachment torments him. Emperor is a superbly imaginative reconstruction of the dramatic weeks leading up to Constantine's triumph in Rome. Written in the form of extracts from his own journal and letters from his empress, her frivolous female companion, his cynical secretary and a Christian bishop who is travelling with the army, the novel records a train of events which will change the world.  Constantine is plagued by spiritual doubts, tortured by his wife's coldness, but he defies the omens to win a great victory at Verona and to lead his army south. On the road to Rome, the conqueror becomes the conquered as a blinding vision strikes him from his horse in an astonishing conversion to Christianity. Emperor summons up the Roman world of two thousand years ago, the everyday life of soldiers on campaign and the intrigues at court. But it is also the many-faceted story of a man's loss of faith in God and in human love, told with uncanny brilliance.

Turning Back The Sun

This transcendentally gifted writer is of course one of the two or three best living travel writers - in some ways probably the best

Far away from the city of his birth, in a frontier town on the edge of tribal wilderness, a doctor tries to resolve the seemingly unreconcilable demands of his public career and his personal feelings. He believes his exile her to be temporary, and youthful memories of the distant city torment him with an unbearable sense of loss. Yet he has grown to love a fellow exile, a woman of fierce independence and strong will, who belongs by nature to the warmth and chaos of the frontier? But, during a summer of drought and disease, the desert erupts into savagery and he is at last confronted by the choice of returning to the city or of remaining with her.

Passage

A short novel with a wide canvas: a long-simmering love triangle, set in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, from the Booker-longlisted novelist and travel writer.‘She was standing at the boat’s prow. He thought: this is how I will remember her, looking into the wind, serene. This will outlast whatever is to come.’ 
 
Kathleen lies awake in the operating theatre as she undergoes brain surgery, her husband Robert watching. Soon afterwards, the couple leave for an ill-advised holiday in Egypt, together with the third person in their marriage, Robert’s brother Alan. Each of them is aware that the tumour in Kathleen’s brain may be fatal. 
 
For Kathleen, an actor, the trauma of her operation brings a haunting sense of the frailty of her identity. Her descent along the ancient Egyptian tomb corridors – symbols of the passage beyond death – evokes a fevered elation. 
 
 Ashraf, their Egyptian guide, is compulsively drawn to her, even as he is caught up in the conflicted politics of his country. As each character struggles with the weight of the past and the uncertainty of the future, the mounting tension resolves in delusion – and a shattering betrayal. 
 
In taut, shimmering prose, Colin Thubron shifts among the perspectives of the four protagonists in a narrative of mesmerising scope and power. 
 
 
Praise for Colin Thubron: 
 
‘One of our greatest prose writers in any genre’ William Dalyrymple, Daily Telegraph 
 
‘From the very first sentence you know that you are in the hands of a great master’ Anthony Beevor 
 
‘[Thubron] summons both landscape and people with nuanced sensitivity... Here is a writer at the top of his game’ Spectator 
 
‘[An] irresistible narrative gift’ Ursula Le Guin, Guardian 
 
‘No writer has more successfully combined the disciplines of travel writing and fiction than Colin Thubron … A master craftsman’ Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

Colin Thubron

A miraculous late-style masterpiece, the equal of any of [Thubron's] earlier works, which will cement his reputation as one of our greatest prose writers in any genre... The Amur River is not just a literary triumph in itself, it is also a demonstration of the continued power of great travel writing

A fascinating read packed with curiosities and incident

Thubron's journey makes for a gripping read...with fascinating political insight

Excellent... Thubron's observations are perceptive and lightly delivered

[Thubron] summons both landscape and people with nuanced sensitivity... Here is a writer at the top of his game, one from whom those toiling on the lower slopes have much to learn

Given Thubron's age, this may be his last major travel book: but he has chosen an important subject, a place where huge geopolitical forces meet and, like tectonic plates, push at each other. When the result could be an earthquake, it's worth paying attention

Colin Thubron

Praise for The Amur River

A miraculous late-style masterpiece, the equal of any of [Thubron's] earlier works, which will cement his reputation as one of our greatest prose writers in any genre... The Amur River is not just a li ...

A fascinating read packed with curiosities and incident

Thubron's journey makes for a gripping read...with fascinating political insight

A miraculous late-style masterpiece, the equal of any of [Thubron's] earlier works, which will cement his reputation as one of our greatest prose writers in any genre... The Amur River is not just a li ...

A fascinating read packed with curiosities and incident

Thubron's journey makes for a gripping read...with fascinating political insight

A miraculous late-style masterpiece, the equal of any of [Thubron's] earlier works, which will cement his reputation as one of our greatest prose writers in any genre... The Amur River is not just a li ...

A fascinating read packed with curiosities and incident

Thubron's journey makes for a gripping read...with fascinating political insight

Books by Colin Thubron

Articles featuring Colin Thubron

Where to start reading Colin Thubron’s travel writing

7 travel writers you need to know

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