“The joy of travel, and reading about it, is the theme of this collection — and perhaps the misery, too; but even remembered misery can produce lyrical nostalgia.” 

Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel

Available today from Paul Theroux, the master of travel writing, THE LOWER RIVER is a ”riveting” and “provocative” (New York Times Book Review) novel of Western illusions and African reality.

Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again.

Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember him—the White Man with no fear of snakes—and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap?

Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain about which no one has ever written better than Theroux.

Read an excerpt.

Summer means lots of traveling, and we’ve got just the book to facilitate an enlightening journey up for grabs in this week’s Win-a-Book Wednesday sweepstakes. Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveler, with words of wisdom from authors, celebrities and famous tumbleweeds added to the mix.

Enter now for your chance to win a copy of The Tao of Travel HERE!

Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Life on the Road enumerates “The Contents of Some Travelers’ Bags” and exposes “Writers Who Wrote about Places They Never Visited”; tracks extreme journeys in “Travel as an Ordeal” and highlights some of “Travelers’ Favorite Places.” Excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected: 

Vladimir Nabokov           J.R.R. Tolkien 
Samuel Johnson               Eudora Welty
Evelyn Waugh                  Isak Dinesen 
Charles Dickens               James Baldwin 
Henry David Thoreau       Pico Iyer 
Mark Twain                     Anton Chekhov 
Bruce Chatwin                  John McPhee
Freya Stark                      Peter Matthiessen 
Graham Greene                Ernest Hemingway

 The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age.

Congratulations to Kate from New Jersey, winner of last week’s giveaway My Misadventures As a Teenage Rock Star.