Bøker av Colin Thubron

A riveting account of a landmark expedition that left only one survivor, now back in print for the first time in decades.Arabia Felix is the spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously awry. On a winter morning in 1761 six men leave Copenhagen by sea-a botanist, a philologist, an astronomer, a doctor, an artist, and their manservant-an ill-assorted band of men who dislike and distrust one another from the start. These are the members of the Danish expedition to Arabia Felix, as Yemen was then known, the first organized foray into a corner of the world unknown to Europeans. The expedition made its way to Turkey and Egypt, by which time its members were already actively seeking to undercut and even kill one another, before disappearing into the harsh desert that was their destination. Nearly seven years later a single survivor returned to Denmark to find himself forgotten and all the specimens that had been sent back ruined by neglect. Based on diaries, notebooks, and sketches that lay unread in Danish archives until the twentieth century, Arabia Felix is a tale of intellectual rivalry and a comedy of very bad manners, as well as an utterly absorbing adventure.Arabia Felix includes 33 line drawings and maps.

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.

"A gripping read with fascinating political insight." (Sunday Times, London)"Elegant, elegiac and poignant...Thubron is an intrepid traveler, a shrewd observer and a lyrical guide... to the river, much of it along the border between these two powers at a time of rapid and tense reconfiguration of global geopolitics." (Washington Post)The most admired travel writer of our time?author of Shadow of the Silk Road and To a Mountain in Tibet?recounts an eye-opening, often perilous journey along a little known Far East Asian river that for over a thousand miles forms the highly contested border between Russia and China.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. Simmering with 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.

"A superb account of a pilgrimage. . . . Characteristically beautiful, though uncharacteristically haunted." --Pico Iyer, New York Review of Books"Thubron walks for the dead and writes for the living, and I can't remember when I have been so thoroughly and deeply moved by an author's outward journey inward." --Bob Shacochis, Boston GlobeNew 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.

Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 by the Spectator'It began with a spark.'A house is burning. At times he shares their preoccupations and memories. 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.

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.

TOP TEN BESTSELLERMount Kailas is the most sacred of the world's mountains - holy to one fifth of humanity.

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.

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.

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.

For four months and five hundred miles the author 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. This title tells his story.

Provides the history of Damascus from the Amorites of the Bible to the revolution of 1966. In explaining how modern Damascus is rooted in immemorial layers of culture and tradition, the author explores the historical, artistic, social and religious inheritance of the Damascenes.

A journey along the greatest land route on earth, from the master of travel writing Colin ThubronOn 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.