An Indian Odyssey

Travelling by land, sea and small plane from north-east India to Sri Lanka and back, Martin Buckley recreates one of the great journeys in world literature - the Ramayana.

Sensual, earthly...incredibly well-informed... An engaging and powerful book

Essential... it brings the reader into the heart of the Indian subcontinent

Travel writing with a difference as Buckley traces the route of the Ramayana, the great Indian epic, from north-west India to Sri Lanka, encountering "Marxists and Mystics" along the way. A brilliant blend of travelogue, history and romance

A meditation on the mysteries of life masquerading as a rollicking road trip, in which Buckley heroically makes his way through the carnal to the divine... His India is a tumbling riot of brothels, beggars, bombs, road accidents, riots, temples... Woven into his own epic adventures is his raunchy and believable abridgement of the epic Ramayana, worthy Vikram Seth

Martin Buckley recreates one of the great journeys in world literature, the Ramayana...An absorbing holiday read

Martin Buckley has lived in France, Italy, Turkey and India and has worked as a journalist and broadcaster in over forty countries. He is married with one young son and currently divides his time between London and Corsica. He is the author of Grains of Sand and Absolute Altitude.

The Ramayana - the Journey of Rama - is India's best-loved book, an inspiration to school-children, monks and moviemakers, yet it is virtually unknown in the Western world. The story of Rama, an exiled prince searching savage jungles for his kidnapped wife, it mixes Homer's Odyssey with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is an ancient epic, at once violent, spiritual and erotic. Yet it also lies at the heart of India's fiercest modern controversy, the Hindu-Muslim clash that has claimed 13,000 lives since 1992. 
 
When Martin Buckley first encountered the Ramayana twenty-five-years ago, it seemed a key to unlocking the myriad mysteries of Indian life. He dreamed of retracing the journey of the blue-skinned warrior god from his birthplace in North India to the climax of his confrontation with evil in Sri Lanka. Buckley's own physical and spiritual odyssey, a sometimes perilous passage through India by motorbike, microlight, bus and train, offers unique and passionate insights into the heart of India - ancient and modern.

Grains Of Sand

Driven by a desire to explore the most remote, barren yet romantic places on earth, Martin Buckley set off on a two-year journey through the world's deserts. In the Sahara he was threatened with murder. In the Gobi, he hijacked a cycle-rickshaw. Dehydrating in the Sonora, he hallucinated fruit cocktails. Encountering the desert at its most extreme, he learned how to find water - and how to spit tobacco into a camel's nostril.Images of the desert exert a powerful grip on the human imagination, from Lawrence of Arabia to Star Wars. Deserts feel familiar, yet mysterious. The truth is that they are even stranger than we imagine.GRAINS OF SAND is a passionate, profound and frequently funny evocation of the world's deserts and the people who live in them; an extraordinary global adventure, and a personal voyage of discovery.

Martin Buckley

A Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Sky

In this exciting and unusual travel book, Martin Buckley journeys through many places, from Benbecula to Rarotonga, from Sudan to New Zealand, from Corsica to Tucson, Arizona - but the country he explores is a romantic and dangerous place that seduces all who travel there - the sky. 
 
Three years ago, Martin Buckley gained a pilot's licence, and set off to 'hitch-hike' by plane around the world. His encounters with a range of sometimes eccentric and always obsessive pilots led to aid flights through war zones in a UN Cessna, aerobatics in a jet fighter, chasing goats across snowy mountains by helicopter and touching the edge of the stratosphere in a Learjet. 
 
The result is a wholly original travel book, free-spirited and often very funny, weaving a bird's-eye view of aviation's peculiar history into the narrative and offering intimate insights into the passion and perils of the pilot's seat.

Martin Buckley

Books by Martin Buckley

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