New Releases by PAUL THEROUX

From the legendary American master Paul Theroux comes a brilliant new novel of chilling psychological depth, the tale of a younger brother whose lifelong rivalry with his older brother—a powerful lawyer with a pattern of gleefully vicious betrayals—culminates in the ultimate plan: murder. Cal has always lived in the shadow of his manipulative and domineering brother, Frank, who was doted upon by their mother and beloved by the girls in their small New England hometown—including Cal’s own girlfriends. In an attempt to escape Frank’s intrusive presence, Cal pursues a different kind of freedom in the world’s wild spaces, prospecting for gold and precious minerals everywhere from the heat of the desert at the Mexican border to the Alaskan chill, to central Africa, and Colombian mines where he will meet the love of his life, Vida. Soon he is dripping in wealth, his pockets full of gold nuggets and emeralds, but the money means far less to him than his independence. To Frank, however, “Cash is king.” As Cal’s success grows, so too does Frank’s power and his influence in Cal’s affairs, the devastating threat he creates at the center of his little brother’s life. And, ultimately, when Frank decides to commit the ultimate betrayal…Cal is left with only one, final solution. Few writers have as keen an eye for human nature as the inimitable Paul Theroux, and this riveting tale of adventure, betrayal, and the true cost of family bonds is an unmissable new work from one of America’s most distinguished and beloved novelists.

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.

Legendary travel writer Theroux drives the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland to uncover the rich, layered world behind today''s brutal headlines.

"A portrait of an optimist with curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms."—The New York Times Book Review "Theroux is at the top of his game with his third collection of essays, a magisterial grouping of intimate remembrances, globe-trotting adventures, and incisive literary critiques."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Theroux''s observations are so keen and writerly skills so sharp that he butter-slices narratives with a razor-thin surgeon''s scalpel, masterfully serving up both the world''s dark underbelly and its gloriously uplifting sustenance of love, longing and wonder-lust." —Forbes Paul Theroux’s latest collection of essays applies his signature searching curiosity to a life lived as much in reading as on the road. This writerly tour-de-force features a satisfyingly varied selection of topics. Travel essays take us to Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and Hawaii, to name a few. Gems of literary criticism reveal fascinating depth in the work of Henry David Thoreau, Muriel Spark, Joseph Conrad, and Hunter Thompson. And in a series of breathtakingly personal profiles, we take a helicopter ride with Elizabeth Taylor, go diagnosing with Oliver Sacks, eavesdrop on the day-to-day life of a Manhattan dominatrix, and explore New York with Robin Williams. An extended meditation on the craft of writing binds together this wide-ranging collection, along with Theroux’s constant quest for the authentic in a person or in a place.

“Theroux possesses a fabulously nasty sense of humor.” — Stephen King, New York Times Book Review To those in her Cape Cod town, Mother is an exemplar of piety, frugality, and hard work. To her husband and seven children, she is a selfish, petty tyrant. She excels at playing her offspring against each other. Her favorite, Angela, died in childbirth; only Angela really understands her, she tells the others. The others include the officious lawyer, Fred; the uproarious professor, Floyd; a pair of inseparable sisters whose devotion to Mother has consumed their lives; and JP, the narrator, a successful writer whose work she disparages. As she lives well past the age of one hundred, her brood struggles with and among themselves to shed her viselike hold on them. Mother Land is a piercing portrait of how a parent’s narcissism impacts a family. While the particulars of his tale are unique, Paul Theroux encapsulates with acute clarity and wisdom a circumstance that is familiar to millions of readers. “Paul Theroux ladles a steaming cup of dysfunctional-family chowder in Mother Land.” — Vanity Fair “An engrossing, emotionally tangled and often merciless examination of family and self . . . Mother Land is a bittersweet, brutally frank family saga that offers enough redemption to make the journey worth it.” — Shelf Awareness

"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."--

The acclaimed travel writer journeys by train across the Americas from Boston to Patagonia in this international bestselling travel memoir. Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, Paul Theroux takes a grand railway adventure first across the United States and then south through Mexico, Central America, and across the Andes until he winds up on the meandering Old Patagonian Express steam engine. His epic commute finally comes to a halt in a desolate land of cracked hills and thorn bushes that reaches toward Antarctica. Along the way, Theroux demonstrates how train travel can reveal ""the social miseries and scenic splendors" of a continent. And through his perceptive prose we learn that what matters most are the people he meets along the way, including the monologuing Mr. Thornberry in Costa Rica, the bogus priest of Cali, and the blind Jorge Luis Borges, who delights in having Theroux read Robert Louis Stevenson to him.

An American pimp in Singapore finds his life of pleasure turning against him in this comic novel by the acclaimed author of The Great Railway Bazaar. Once a small-time American hustler, Jack Flowers found his calling when he jumped into the Straits of Malacca and hitched a ride to Singapore. Deftly identifying the fastest route to fame along the seedy port, Jack started hiring girls out to lonely tourists, sailors, bachelors—anyone with some loose change and a wandering eye. Some years later, he''s running two pleasure palaces and something of a legend among those in the know. But just as Jack is riding high, a shocking tumble toward the brink of death leaves him shaken, depressed and vulnerable. Desperate to pull himself back up, he''s quick to do business with Edwin Shuck, a powerful American working to take down an unsuspecting general. Marked with Paul Theroux''s trademark biting humor, Saint Jack is an audacious tale of sex, faith, guilt, innocence, middle-age, and the meaning of it all.

“Suave and accomplished . . . [The stories] are unsettling, resistant to tidy denouement and faintly misanthropic.” — Washington Post “Beneath the deceptive elegance of these stories, land mines lurk, and Theroux detonates them with gusto.” — O, the Oprah Magazine A family watches their patriarch transform into the singing, wisecracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. An art collector publicly destroys his most valuable pieces. Two boys stand by as their father wages war on the raccoons living under their house. In this new collection, acclaimed author Paul Theroux shows us humanity possessed, consumed by compulsive desire, always with his carefully honed eye for detail and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life. Searing, dark, and sure to unsettle, Mr. Bones is a stunning display of Theroux’s “fluent, faintly sinister powers of vision and imagination” (The New Yorker). “Fans of Theroux’s fiction will be pleased to observe, in the twenty stories collected in Mr. Bones, clear evidence of how little he has mellowed over time . . . Mr. Bones is a series of characteristically dark and sharply focused snapshots from the world that Paul Theroux has observed—and invented.” — Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review

The acclaimed writer shares an intimate portrait of his former mentor V.S. Naipaul in this memoir of their thirty-year friendship and sudden falling out. Paul Theroux was a young aspiring writer when he met the legendary V.S. Naipaul in Uganda in 1966. There began a friendship that would span continents as both men ascended the ranks of literary stardom. Naipaul''s early encouragement of Theroux''s talent had a profound impact on him—yet the apprenticeship was not always easy. This heartfelt and revealing account of Theroux''s thirty-year friendship with Naipaul explores the unique effect each writer had on the other. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a personal account of how one develops as a writer and how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life. A New York Times Notable Book

A final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers Journeying alone, in what he feels will be his last African journey, Paul Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of post-colonial independence movements. Having travelled down the right-hand side of Africa in Dark Star Safari, he sets out this time from Cape Town, heading northwards up the left-hand side, through South Africa and Namibia, to Botswana, heading for the Congo, in search of the end of the line.

''No one ever sees me write. One of the triumphs of fiction is that it is created in the dark. It leaves my house in a plain wrapper, with no bloodstains. Unlike me, my stories are whole and indestructible.'' In The Collected Stories, Paul Theroux''s canvas stretches from London to South-East Asia, from Boston to Paris, from Africa to Eastern Europe and from Moscow to the tropics in this vibrant collection. Full of suspense and the unexpected, these stories by the acclaimed author of The Old Patagonian Express and Dark Star Safari delve into the worlds of a vast spectrum of characters and display throughout a flair that shows Theroux to be a master of the form. Praise for Paul Theroux: ''A shimmering, kaleidoscopic and very entertaining collection'' Sunday Telegraph ''You close the book feeling you have read a single big narrative rather than a series of short ones . . . As a short-story writer, he makes a terrific novelist'' Sunday Times ''Theroux willingly explores the blighted territory of a failing marriage; the tangled jungle of a mad poet''s secret anti-Semitism; the belated sexual guilt of a Hindu . . . A book of many and varied pleasures; to read it is to feel alert, curious, adventurous'' Observer ''Paul Theroux''s writing is impeccable and thoughtfully entertaining . . . his artistry is individual, serene, yet also grainy with fierce truths'' The Times ''One needs energy to keep up with the extraordinary productive restlessness of Paul Theroux . . . [He is] the most gifted, most prodigal writer of his generation'' Jonathan Raban Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo, in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace, The Mosquito Coast, O-Zone, Millroy the Magician, My Secret History, My Other Life, and, most recently, A Dead Hand. His highly acclaimed travel books include Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Fresh Air Fiend, and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. He divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian Islands.

A taut, tense, darkly suspenseful novel about a man who flees to Africa afterhis marriage falls apart, only to be caught up in a precarious situation in aseemingly benign village.

Award-winning writer Paul Theroux takes us on a journey through small town Malaysia through the eyes of the exuberant Spencer Savage in his breathtaking novel The Consul''s File. Spencer Savage, a young American consul, is posted to Ayer Hitam, a small Malaysian town, in the 1970s. Told to close down this remote outpost in the sweltering jungle, he instead finds himself drawn to the many characters he meets among the Malays, Indians, Japanese, Chinese and the clubbable expat Brits. Through his eyes we see the rich tapestry of multi-ethnic life in post-colonial Malaysia, from adultery to murder, from ghost stories to the murky waters of diplomatic politics. It is a brilliant portrait of a vanished time, a lost landscape and scattered peoples. ''A cool and witty sequence. . . a polished and professional performance'' Guardian ''Theroux''s writing is at its most adventurous in The Consul''s File. There is no book I can compare this to: Mr Theroux''s artistry is individual, serene, yet also grainy with fierce truths'' The Times 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 novels and collected short stories, My Other Life, The Collected Stories, My Secret History, The Lower River, The Stranger at the Palazzo d''Oro, A Dead Hand, Millroy the Magician, The Elephanta Suite, Saint Jack, The Family Arsenal, The Mosquito Coast, and his works of non-fiction, including the iconic The Great Railway Bazaar are available from Penguin.

The acclaimed author explores the greatest travel writing by literary adventurers from Freya Stark and James Baldwin to Nabokov and Hemmingway. Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe with this meditative journey through the books that shaped him as a reader and traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel 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, including J.R.R. Tolkien, Samuel Johnson, Eudora Welty, Evelyn Waugh, Isak Dinesen, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Pico Iyer, Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee, Peter Matthiessen, Graham Greene, Paul Bowles, and many more.

"Theroux''s best novel in years." CHICAGO TRIBUNE MY SECRET HISTORY is Paul Theroux''s tour de force. It is the story of Andre Parent, a writer, a world traveler, a lover of every kind of woman he chances to meet in a life as varied as a man can lead. From his days as an altar boy, to his job as a teenaged lifeguard, and then as a youth caught between the attentions of a beautiful young student and an amorous older woman. And as the boy becomes a man he turns his attention to writing, which brings him fame, and a wife, who may finally bring him to know himself. But not before he sets up his most dangerous secret life, one that any man might envy, but that could cost Andre Parent the delicate balance that makes him who he is....

"DAZZLING." --Time "[THEROUX''S] WORK IS DISTINGUISHED BY A SPLENDID EYE FOR DETAIL AND THE TELLING GESTURE; a storyteller''s sense of pacing and gift for granting closure to the most subtle progression of events; and the graceful use of language. . . . We are delighted, along with Theroux, by the politeness of the Turks, amazed by the mountainous highlands in Syria, touched by the gesture of an Albanian waitress who will not let him pay for his modest meal. . . . The Pillars of Hercules [is] engrossing and enlightening from start (a damning account of tourists annoying the apes of Gibraltar) to finish (an utterly captivating visit with Paul Bowles in Tangier, worth the price of the book all by itself)." --Chicago Tribune "ENTERTAINING READING . . . WHEN YOU READ THEROUX, YOU''RE TRULY ON A TRIP." --The Boston Sunday Globe "HIS PICARESQUE NARRATIVE IS STUDDED WITH SCENES THAT STICK IN THE MIND. He looks at strangers with a novelist''s eye, and his portraits are pleasantly tinged with malice." --The Washington Post Book World "THEROUX AT HIS BEST . . . An armchair trip with Theroux is sometimes dark, but always a delight." --Playboy "AS SATISFYING AS A GLASS OF COOL WINE ON A DUSTY CALABRIAN AFTERNOON . . . With his effortless writing style, observant eye, and take-no-prisoners approach, Theroux is in top form chronicling this 18-month circuit of the Mediterranean." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

When Jerry Delfont, a travel writer with writer''s block, receives a letter from an American philanthropist, Mrs Merrill Unger, with news of a scandal involving an Indian friend of her son''s, he is sufficiently intrigued to pursue the story. Who is the dead boy found on the floor of a cheap hotel room, how and why did he die - and will this writer, whom Mrs Unger claims to admire, find out what really happened? Jerry is swiftly captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Mrs Unger, and revived by her Tantric massages, but the circumstances surrounding the dead boy cause him increasingly to doubt the exact nature of her philanthropy. With his trademark clarity of description and observation, Theroux brings to dramatic life a dark and twisted narrative of obsession and need.

The acclaimed travel writer chronicles a year of train travel across China in a revealing travelogue that " gives the reader much to relish and think about " ( Publishers Weekly). The author of the train travel classics The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, takes to the rails once again in this account of his epic journey through China. The always irascible, infectiously curious author "is in top form as he describes the barren deserts of Mongolia and Xinjiang, the ice forests of Manchuria and the dry hills of Tibet. He captures their otherworldly, haunting appearances perfectly. He is also right on target when he talks about the ugliness of China''s poorly planned, hastily built cities" (Mark Salzman, The New York Times). Theroux hops aboard a train as part of a tour group in London and sets out for China''s border. He then spends a year traversing the country, where he pieces together a fascinating snapshot of a unique moment in history. From sweeping and desolate natural landscapes to the dense metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing, and Canton, Theroux offers an unforgettable portrait of a magnificent land and an extraordinary people.

This "interesting, insightful book" by the author of Deep South reveals "a side of Britain few visitors see" ( The New York Times Book Review). After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scotland, the people he encountered along the way revealed far more of themselves than they perhaps intended to display to a stranger. Theroux captured their rich and varied conversational commentary with caustic wit and penetrating insight. "A sharp and funny descriptive writer . . . Theroux is a good companion." — The Times (London)

Beginning in New Zealand and coming to shore in Hawaii, the author explores fifty-one islands along the way in a collapsible kayak.

In his first new travel book in eight years, the endearingly irascible Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry and train.

A writer turned Hawaiian hotel manager observes the many lives that pass through his rooms in this novel by the author of The Great Railway Bazaar. A New York Times Notable Book In this wickedly satiric romp, a down-on-his-luck writer finds escape from his life as the manager of a low-rent hotel a few blocks from the beach in Waikiki. His boss is quick to explain that the Hotel Honolulu is a multistory establishment—and the writer soon discovers just how many stories are contained in its walls. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all check in. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest has come in search of something, whether it''s sun, love, happiness, or objects of unnameable longing. And every guest—not to mention the staff, the owner, and the author himself—has a story. By turns hilarious, ribald, tender, and tragic, Hotel Honolulu offers a unique glimpse into the psychological landscape of an American paradise. "A sun-soaked Decameron."— Chicago Sun-Times

In this complex, candid confessional, Paul Theroux''s newest protagonist is one of depth and great subtlety whose tragedy is unique--or is it? Life, to the hero of My Other Life, has no apparent plot and so it seems messier than fiction. With enormous insight and self-knowledge, Theroux, the author of The Mosquito Coast and My Secret History, divulges his beliefs in secrets.

“There are those who think that Paul Theroux is the finest travel writer working in English. This collection can only enhance that reputation.”—The New York Times Book Review Author and travel writer Paul Theroux does what no one else can: he travels to the isolated, unusual, and fascinating spots of the world, and creates an elegy to them that makes readers feel they are traveling with him. Evocative, breathtaking, intriguing, here is the armchair traveler''s guide to the sites of the world he makes us feel we know. Praise for To the Ends of the Earth “Reads like a wonderful novel.”—The Pittsburgh Press “Powerful . . . This compendium unequivocally offers insight into the mind of a foremost American fiction writer who became an accidental tourist.”—The Christian Science Monitor “Theroux is a wonderful traveling companion. . . . To the Ends of the Earth combines the best of his travel writing. . . . With him the reader shares a conversation with a sultan on a polo ground in Malaysia; hears people ‘mourn with firecrackers, scattering cherrybombs on the tombstone’ in a Chinese cemetery in Singapore; feels overdressed around nudists in Corsica; sees sandbagged houses and bombcraters left in Vietnam on a cold December day in 1973.”—The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star “Travel writing at its best . . . As you travel voyeuristically with Theroux, across the vast wastelands of interior China, the convoluted cultures of Latin America or campy seacoast towns of England, you''re struck with his slightly jaundiced eye for the overlooked but telling detail, his skeptic''s ear for the offhand but important comment.”—The Houston Post

This book is author''s choice of his best travel writing, harvested from half a dozen of his books. He has chosen his favourite people, his most vivid journeys, the landscapes that he treasures - some splendours, some miseries, all memorable.

"Since its discovery by Magellan in 1520, Patagonia has retained its fascination as a metaphor for The Ultimate. Here Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux join forces in a literary quest for some of the instances in which these ''final capes of exile'' have affected the literary imagination. This lively and delightful curio had its origins in an entertainment the two writers gave for The Royal Geographical Society, at a time when Paul Theroux was following Bruce Chatwin''s ''In Patagonia'' with ''The Old Patagonian Express''"--Publisher''s description, p. [2] of dust jacket.

Impressies in woord en beeld van een treinreis door Pakistan, India en Bangladesh.

This book decribes the author''s sail down the Yangtze with a party of American millionaires.