Paul Theroux

The Great Railway Bazaar

The author recounts his odyssey down the length of Africa, from Cairo to South Africa, describing the bad food, many delays, discomforts, and dangers of his trip, along with the people and places of the real Africa.

Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

Dark Star Safari

Award-winning travel writer Paul Theroux invites you aboard The Old Patagonian Express by Train through the Americas; packed with powerful descriptions and portraits of the many colours of humanity, The Old Patagonian Express is an unforgettable read. A witty sharply observed journey down the length of North and South America Beginning his journey in Boston, where he boarded the subway commuter train, and catching trains of all kinds on the way, Paul Theroux tells of his voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts and Illinois to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip. Sweating and shivering by turns as the temperature and altitude shoot up and down, thrown in with the appalling Mr Thornberry in Limón and reading nightly to the blind writer, Borges, in Buenos Aires, Theroux vividly evokes the contrasts of a journey 'to the end of the line'. 'Fascinating, beautifully written. . . a vivid travelogue described with the sensitive, richly observant pen of a born writer' Sunday Express 'This is travel writing at its most accomplished. . . even the bored are funny and human, and the description of homeless children is painfully unforgettable' Sunday Telegraph American travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people and places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his other non-fiction titles, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Happy Isles of Oceania, Sunrise with Seamonsters, The Kingdom by the Sea, The Tao of Travel, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, The Great Railway Bazaar, Dark Star Safari, Fresh-air Fiend, Sir Vidia's Shadow, The Pillars of Hercules, and his novels and collections of short stories, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize winner The Mosquito Coast are available from Penguin.

By Train Through the Americas

The Old Patagonian Express

SOON TO BE AN APPLE TV+ SERIES STARRING JUSTIN THEROUX AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER• "A gripping adventure story."—New York Times Book Review The paranoid and brilliant inventor Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they've left. Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity, he hopes to rediscover a purer life. But his utopian experiment takes a dark turn when his obsessions lead the family toward unimaginable danger.

The Mosquito Coast

Describes the author's travels by train in every province of the People's Republic of China.

By Train Through China

Riding the Iron Rooster

A collection of writings from Paul Theroux's fifty years of travel. Included are writings from other travelers such as Charles Dickens, Eudora Welty, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway and many others.

Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

The Tao of Travel

One of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time turns his unflinching eye on an American South too often overlooked Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America -- the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation's worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It's these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux's keen traveler's eye. On road trips spanning four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits gun shows and small-town churches, laborers in Arkansas, and parts of Mississippi where they still call the farm up the road "the plantation." He talks to mayors and social workers, writers and reverends, the working poor and farming families -- the unsung heroes of the south, the people who, despite it all, never left, and also those who returned home to rebuild a place they could never live without. From the writer whose "great mission has always been to transport us beyond that reading chair, to challenge himself -- and thus, to challenge us" (Boston Globe), Deep South is an ode to a region, vivid and haunting, full of life and loss alike.

Deep South

Legendary travel writer Paul Theroux drives the entire length of the US-Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland, on the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind today's brutal headlines. Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples that give life to the places they call home. Now, as immigration debates boil around the world, Theroux has set out to explore a country key to understanding our current discourse: Mexico. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. With the same humanizing sensibility he employed in Deep South, Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as their families brave the journey north. From the writer praised for his "curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms" (New York Times Book Review), On the Plain of Snakes is an exploration of a region in conflict.

A Mexican Journey

On the Plain of Snakes

National Bestseller InGhost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux recreates an epic journey he took thirty years ago, a giant loop by train (mostly) through Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India booms, Burma slowly smothers, and Vietnam prospers despite the havoc unleashed upon it the last time Theroux passed through. He witnesses all this and more in a 25,000 mile journey, travelling as the locals do, by train, car, bus, and foot. His odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hungover from Communism, through tense but thriving Turkey, into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbour Azerbaijan revels in oil-driven capitalism. As he penetrates deeper into Asia’s heart, his encounters take on an otherworldly cast. The two chapters that follow show us Turkmenistan, a profoundly isolated society at the mercy of an almost comically egotistical dictator, and Uzbekistan, a ruthless authoritarian state. From there, he retraces his steps through India, Mayanmar, China, and Japan, providing his penetrating observations on the changes these countries have undergone. Brilliant, caustic, and totally addictive,Ghost Train to the Eastern Staris Theroux at his very best.

On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

From legendary writer Paul Theroux comes an atmospheric novel following a big-wave surfer as he confronts aging, privilege, mortality, and whose lives we choose to remember.

Under the Wave at Waimea

Paddling the Pacific

Happy Isles of Oceania

An acclaimed travel writer and novelist describes his journey across Africa, from Cape Town to Cape Province and into Namibia, riding elephants, meeting Bushmen and discussing the changes that have taken place since his first visit 50 years ago.

My Ultimate African Safari

The Last Train to Zona Verde

Traces a modern version of the Grand Tour of Europe--a lively, sometimes violent journey around the shores of the Mediterranean

A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean

The Pillars of Hercules

As mentioned in The Times Travel Book Club 2020 Award winning writer Paul Theroux embarks on a journey that, though closer to home than most of his expeditions, uncovers some surprising truths about Britain and the British people in the '80s in The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain. Paul Theroux's round-Britain travelogue is funny, perceptive and 'best avoided by patriots with high blood pressure...' After eleven years living as an American in London, Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise round the coast and find out what Britain and the British are really like. It was 1982, the summer of the Falklands War, the ideal time, he found, to surprise the British into talking about themselves. The result makes superbly vivid and engaging reading. 'A sharp and funny descriptive writer. One of his golden talents, perhaps because he is American and therefore classless in British eyes, is the ability to chat up and get on with all sorts and conditions of British. . . Theroux is a good companion' The Times 'Filled with history, insights, landscape, epiphanies, meditations, celebrations and laments' The New York Times 'Few of us have seen the entirety of the coast and I for one am grateful to Mr Theroux for making my journey unnecessary. He describes it all brilliantly and honestly' Anthony Burgess, Observer American travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people and places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his other non-fiction titles, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Happy Isles of Oceania, Sunrise with Seamonsters, The Tao of Travel, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, The Old Patagonian Express, The Great Railway Bazaar, Dark Star Safari, Fresh-air Fiend, Sir Vidia's Shadow, The Pillars of Hercules, and his novels and collections of short stories, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize winner The Mosquito Coast are available from Penguin.

A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

The Kingdom by the Sea

The travel writer shares his essays on a host of his favorite destinations, including Hong Kong, Maine, Africa, and the Pacific islands.

Travel Writings

Fresh Air Fiend

From the acclaimed author of The Mosquito Coast and The Bad Angel Brothers comes a riveting new novel exploring one of English literature's most beloved and controversial figures--George Orwell--and the early years as an officer in colonial Burma that transformed him from Eric Blair, the British Raj policeman, into Orwell the anticolonial writer. At age nineteen, young Eton graduate Eric Blair set sail for India, dreading the assignment ahead. Along with several other young conscripts, he would be trained for three years as a servant of the British Empire, overseeing the local policemen in Burma. Navigating the social, racial, and class politics of his fellow British at the same time as he learned the local languages and struggled to control his men would prove difficult enough. But doing all of this while grappling with his own self-worth, his sense that he was not cut out for this, is soon overwhelming for the young Blair. Eventually, his clashes with his superiors, and the drama that unfolds in this hot, beautiful land, will change him forever.

Burma Sahib

"A delectable collection of Theroux's recent writing on great places, people, and prose"--

people and places --essays: 2001-2016

Figures in a landscape

Great Railway Bazaar

A Novel

Bad Angel Brothers

Nurse Wolf is Manhattan's Queen of Pain - she gives pleasure by inflicting it, gains pleasure from causing it. The neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks is her opposite, a defuser of pain, a comforter. And yet the dominatrix and the doctor operate in similar territory: both are involved in the ritual and theatrical aspects of sexuality. In Nurse Wolf and Dr Sacks, Paul Theroux hears two remarkable confessions. His book offers an extraordinary insight into the 'other' side of New York.

Paul Theroux

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