Colin Thubron

The author of In Siberia recounts his ambitious and dangerous trek along the legendary Silk Road, during which he ventured from the heart of China to the mountains of Central Asia, through northern Afghanistan, across the plains of Iran, and into Kurdish Turkey, on a journey that exposed him to the vibrant local cultures and trades. 25,000 first printing.

Shadow of the Silk Road

'In Siberia is travel writing at its very best: luminous, lyrical, erudite and almost painfully sensitive, full of atmosphere and oddities and the breath of landscapes that seem too vast to comprehend. Thurbron stands among the greatest travel writers of this or any age' Stanley Stewart, Literary Review

In Siberia

A dramatic and ambitious new journey for our greatest travel writer The Amur River is almost unknown. Yet it is the tenth longest river in the world, rising in the Mongolian mountains and flowing through Siberia to the Pacific. For 1,100 miles it forms the tense border between Russia and China. Haunted by the memory of land-grabs and unequal treaties, this is the most densely fortified frontier on earth. In his eightieth year, Colin Thubron takes a dramatic journey from the Amur's secret source to its giant mouth, covering almost 3,000 miles. Harassed by injury and by arrest from the local police, he makes his way along both the Russian and Chinese shores, starting out by Mongolian horse, then hitchhiking, sailing on poacher's sloops or travelling the Trans-Siberian Express. Having revived his Russian and Mandarin, he talks to everyone he meets, from Chinese traders to Russian fishermen, from monks to indigenous peoples. By the time he reaches the river's desolate end, where Russia's nineteenth-century imperial dream petered out, a whole, pivotal world has come alive. The Amur River is a shining masterpiece by the acknowledged laureate of travel writing, an urgent lesson in history and the culmination of an astonishing career.

The Amur River

Here is a fresh perspective on the last tumultuous years of the Soviet Union and an exquisitely poetic travelogue.With a keen grasp of Russia's history, a deep appreciation for its architecture and iconography, and an inexhaustible enthusiasm for its people and its culture, Colin Thubron is the perfect guide to a country most of us will never get to know firsthand. Here, we can walk down western Russia's country roads, rest in its villages, and explore some of the most engaging cities in the world. Beautifully written and infinitely insightful, Among the Russians is vivid, compelling travel writing that will also appeal to readers of history and current events—and to anyone captivated by the shape and texture of one of the world's most enigmatic culture.

Among the Russians

Well-known travel writer, Thubron here describes his experiences on a journey through China. His most recent travel book is To the Last City.

Behind the Wall

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Artemis Cooper

The long-awaited final volume of the trilogy by Patrick Leigh Fermor. A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water were the first two volumes in a projected trilogy that would describe the walk that Patrick Leigh Fermor undertook at the age of eighteen from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. 'When are you going to finish Vol. III?' was the cry from his fans; but although he wished he could, the words refused to come. The curious thing was that he had not only written an early draft of the last part of the walk, but that it predated the other two. It remains unfinished but The Broken Road - edited and introduced by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper - completes an extraordinary journey.

From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos

The Broken Road

A land of enormous proportions, countless secrets, and incredible history, Central Asia--the heart of the great Mongol empire of Tamerlane, site of the legendary Silk Route and scene of Stalin's cruelest deportations--is a remote and fascinating region. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of newly independent republics, Central Asia--containing the magical cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, and terrain as diverse as the Kazakh steppes, the Karakum desert, and the Pamir mountains--has been in a constant state of transition. The Lost Heart of Asia takes readers into the very heart of this little visited, yet increasingly important region, delivering a rare and moving portrayal of a world in the midst of change.

The Lost Heart of Asia

Award-winning, bestselling novelist and travel writer Colin Thubron returns to fiction with his first novel in more than a decade, a searing, poetic masterwork of memory. A house is burning, threatening the existence of its six tenants—including a failed priest; a naturalist; a neurosurgeon; an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood; and their landlord, whose relationship to the tenants is both intimate and shadowy. At times, he shares their preoccupations and memories. He will also share their fate. In Night of Fire, the passions and obsessions in a dying house loom and shift, from those of the hallucinating drug addict in the basement to the landlord training his rooftop telescope on the night skies. As the novel progresses, the tenants’ diverse stories take us through an African refugee camp, Greek Orthodox monasteries, and the cremation grounds of India. Haunting the edges of their lives are memories. Will these remembrances be consumed forever by the flames? Or can they survive in some form? Night of Fire is Colin Thubron’s fictive masterpiece: a novel of exquisite beauty, philosophical depth, and lingering mystery that is a brilliant meditation on life itself.

A Novel

Night of Fire

“Colin Thubron is the intrepid, resourceful and immensely talented writer who has made a career out of going to out of the way places and then writing brilliantly about them.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World “Thanks to Thubron, we encounter a world which, in its beauty and awe, exceeds our imagination." —Ryszard Kapuscinski, author of Shah of Shahs and Imperium New York Times bestselling author Colin Thubron returns with a moving, intimate, and exquisitely crafted travel memoir recounting his pilgrimage to the Hindu and Buddhist holy mountain of Kailas—whose peak represents the most sacred place on Earth to roughly a quarter the global population. With echoes of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, Peter Hessler’s Country Driving, and Paul Theoroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Thubron’s follow up to his bestselling Shadow of the Silk Road will illuminate, interest, and inspire anyone interested in traveling the world or journeying into the soul.

To a Mountain in Tibet

Journey into Cyprus

As mysterious as its beautiful, as forbidding as it is populated with warm-hearted people, Syberia is a land few Westerners know, and even fewer will ever visit. Traveling alone, by train, boat, car, and on foot, Colin Thubron traversed this vast territory, talking to everyone he encountered about the state of the beauty, whose natural resources have been savagely exploited for decades; a terrain tainted by nuclear waste but filled with citizens who both welcomed him and fed him—despite their own tragic poverty. From Mongoloia to the Artic Circle, from Rasputin's village in the west through tundra, taiga, mountains, lakes, rivers, and finally to a derelict Jewish community in the country's far eastern reaches, Colin Thubron penetrates a little-understood part of the world in a way that no writer ever has.

A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and an invalid dreaming of his anxious childhood. Their landlord's relationship to them is both intimate and shadowy. At times he shares their preoccupations and memories, he will also share their fate. In Night of Fire, the passions and obsessions of these unquiet lives reach beyond the dying house that holds them. Ranging from an African refugee camp to the cremation-grounds of India, their memories mutate and criss-cross in a novel of lingering beauty and mystery.

Night of fire

This is an account of a 600-mile trek on foot around Cyprus in the last year of the islands peace. The author intertwines myth, history and personal anecdote with descriptions of characters, places, architecture and landscape and traces the island's survival through centuries of invasion.

Journey Into Cyprus

Broken Road

To be travelling the Silk Road is to be travelling the history of the world: tracing the passage not just of trade and armies, but also of ideas, religions and inventions. Thubron's chosen route passes through China, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. It is a brilliant account of an ancient world in modern ferment. From the Hardcover edition.

This is a book describing the historical sights that await the traveller of Damascus. The author, Colin Thubron, has built up a following with his travel writing on places in the world least understood by people.

Mirror to Damascus

Discusses the history of Jerusalem, the three religions that revere this city as a holy place, and the city and its people today.

Jerusalem

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.

To The Last City

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.

Colin Thubron

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