The Lost Heart of Asia (47 page)

Author's Picks
About Abroad

The Road to Oxiana
by Robert Byron

This record of a journey taken in 1933-1934 through Persia and Afghanistan has been called the
Ulysses
and “The Waste Land” of travel writing. It is a brilliant collage of humorous vignette, scenic evocation, and some of the most precise and beautiful architectural descriptions in the language. Its author died in 1941 at the age of thirty-five, his boat torpedoed in the North Sea.

The Children of Sanchez
by Oscar Lewis

An anthropologist's tour de force that documents the lives of the four sons and daughters of a patriarchal family in a Mexico City slum. Recounted in their own words, it opens the reader into a world with its own bitter logic and survival structures.

Night of Stone
by Catherine Merridale

The most penetrating and imaginative study of Russia's twentieth-century nightmare that I know. This is a humane and unsentimental book, of great authority, and a beautiful inquiry into the nature of guilt and grief.

A Time of Gifts
by Patrick Leigh Fermor

The first of a projected trilogy recording the author's journey on foot from Holland to Istanbul in 1933-1934. An ebullient, richly described narrative of a young man's initiation into the glories of prewar Europe.

The Tree of Man
by Patrick White

Surely Australia's
Book of Genesis,
this prodigious novel portrays an ordinary family trying to carve out a life in the Outback. It invests the course of everyday events with the epic grandeur of nineteenth-century Russian fiction.

The Day of Judgment
by Salvatore Satta

The only work of an Italian lawyer who for thirty years recorded his memories of Sardinian life as lightly veiled fiction. The stories of priests, peasants, aristocrats, and incarcerated women flow at last into an austere magical realism. The manuscript was found among the author's papers after he died in 1975.

The Lycian Shore
by Freya Stark

In this study of a still-tranquil land— Turkey's southwest shore—the author evokes ancient history with a lyricism all her own, fusing landscape, Greek ruins and the classical past into a narrative of unique enchantment. A quiet classic.

Stalin's Nose
by Rory MacLean

Rory MacLean's first book crashed through the norms of travel writing to create a surreal masterpiece. It describes a journey through Eastern Europe in 1989-1990 in a decrepit Trabant, with an eccentric aunt and a Tamworth pig. Their crazy progress becomes an allegory of the tortured countries through which they go.

Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino

In this hypnotic fable, Marco Polo describes a succession of visionary cities, suggestive of dreams or disordered states of mind, to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. It becomes a haunting guide to imagined ways of being.

Read on
Have You Read?
More by Colin Thubron

SHADOW OF THE SILK ROAD

Shadow of the Silk Road
records a journey along the greatest land route on earth. Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch—in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel.

The Silk Road
is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. But alongside this rich and astonishing past,
Shadow of the Silk Road
is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval.

One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him.
Shadow of the Silk Road
encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.

“An intrepid, resourceful and immensely talented writer . . . . An uncommonly interesting and rewarding book . . . . All in all, a splendid book.”

—Jonathan Yardley,
Washington Post Book World

“A sublime travel writer in the tradition of Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor. . . . [Thubron captures] the most evocative details in the landscapes and in the lives of ordinary people with lyricism, compassion, and wit.”

—Boston Globe

IN SIBERIA

As mysterious as it is beautiful, as forbidding as it is populated with warm-hearted people, Siberia 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 country, 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 Mongolia to the Artie 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.

“Thubron's ability to see, feel, analyze, to blend the present and the past, makes
In Siberia
more than a travel book. His keen eye, like a great photographer's, sees more than an image; he captures the essence of Siberia.”

—Chicago Tribune

AMONG THE RUSSIANS

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 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 seeking connection with one of the world's most enigmatic cultures.

“Superb . . . . One of the best books on Russia to appear in years.”

—
New York Times

“Colin Thubron is an ideal guide. Well informed about icons, architecture, and history, he is also wonderfully articulate . . . especially in descriptive passages, the language becomes a grave and stately music.”

—Washington Post Book World

Also By Colin Thubron

NONFICTION

Mirror to Damascus
The Hills of Adonis
Jerusalem
Journey into Cyprus
Among the Russians
Behind the Wall
In Siberia
Shadow of the Silk Road

 

FICTION
The God in the Mountain
Emperor
A Cruel Madness
Falling
Turning Back the Sun Distance
To the Last City

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1994 by HarperCollins Publishers.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

THE LOST HEART OF ASIA.
Copyright © 1994 by Colin Thubron. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. N o part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N Y 10022.

First Harper Perennial edition published 1995. Reissued 2008. Reprinted in Perennial 2001.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

Thubron, Colin.
    The lost heart of Asia / Colin Thubron.
      p.cm.
    Includes index. ISBN 0-06-018226-1
    1. Asia, Central—Description and travel. 2. Thubron, Colin, 1939– —Journeys—Asia, Central. I. Title.

    DS527.8.T47     1994

    915.804'2—dc20

94-12971

ISBN 978-0-06-157767-3 (pbk.)

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EPub Edition © June 2011 ISBN: 9780062104724