Paul Theroux has written many works of fiction and travel writing, including the modern classics The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, My Secret History and The Mosquito Coast. He won the Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing 2020. Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux sets off for Cape Town from Cairo -- the hard way. 
 
Travelling across bush and desert, down rivers and across lakes, and through country after country, Theroux visits some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, and some of the most dangerous. It is a journey of discovery and of rediscovery -- of the unknown and the unexpected, but also of people and places he knew as a young and optimistic teacher forty years before. 
 
Safari in Swahili simply means "journey", and this is the ultimate safari. It is Theroux in his element -- a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere.

Dark Star Safari

Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

Paul Theroux invites us to join him on one of his most exotic and tantalizing adventures exploring the coasts and blue lagoons of the Pacific Islands, and taking up residence to discover the secrets of these isles. 
 
Theroux is a mesmerizing narrator &ndash; brilliant, witty, keenly perceptive as he floats through Gauguin landscapes, sails in the wake of Captain Cook and recalls the bewitching tales of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson. Alone in his kayak, paddling to seldom visited shores, he glides through time and space, discovering a world of islands, their remarkable people, and in turn, happiness. 
 
&lsquo;A sharp, fascinating and highly entertaining book &hellip; Theroux at his best&rsquo; Daily Telegraph.

The Happy Isles of Oceania

Paddling the Pacific

Nogales is a border town caught between Mexico and the United States of America. A 40-foot steel fence runs through its centre, separating the prosperous US side from the impoverished Mexican side. It is a fascinating site of tension, now more than ever, as the town fills with hopeful border crossers and the deportees who have been caught and brought back. And it is here that Paul Theroux will begin his journey into the culturally rich but troubled heart of modern Mexico. 
 
Mexico is a country that has captured literary imaginations from D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene to Aldous Huxley. Now Paul Theroux, master of travel writing, immerses himself, attending local language and culinary schools, driving through the country, getting under its skin.

On the Plain of Snakes

A Mexican Road Trip

Paul Theroux left Victoria Station on a rainy Saturday in April thinking that taking eight trains across Europe, Eastern Europe, the USSR and Mongolia would be the easy way to get to the Chinese border - the relaxing way, even. He would read a little, take notes, eat regular meals and gaze contentedly out of windows. The reality, of course, was very different. 
 
In fact, Theroux experienced a decidedly odd and unexpected trip to China that set the challenging tone for his epic year-long rail journey around that vast, inscrutable land - a journey which involved riding nearly every train in the country. 
 
'Wry, humorful and occasionally querulous ... as Theroux makes excruciatingly clear, travelling alone in the Middle Kingdom is not for the faint of heart or stomach' Time.

Riding the Iron Rooster

By Train Through China

Having travelled down the right-hand side of Africa in Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux sets out this time from Cape Town, heading northwards in a new direction, up the left-hand side, through South Africa and Namibia, to Botswana, then on into Angola, heading for the Congo, in search of the end of the line. 
 
Journeying alone through the greenest continent, Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the intineraries of tourists and the hopes of post-colonial independence movements. After the Cape Town townships, the Namibian bush and the browsing cattle of the great sunbaked heartland of the savannah, he crosses "the Red Line" into a different Africa: of heat and poverty, and of roadblocks, mobs and anarchy. 
 
A final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers, The Last Train to Zona Verde is Paul Theroux's ultimate safari.

The Last Train to Zona Verde

Overland from Cape Town to Angola

Thirty years ago Paul Theroux left London and travelled across Asia and back again by train. His account of the journey - The Great Railway Bazaar - was a landmark book and made his name as the foremost travel writer of his generation. Now Theroux makes the trip all over again. Through Eastern Europe, India and Asia to discover the changes that have swept the continents, and also to learn what an old man will make of a young man's journey. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is a brilliant chronicle of change and an exploration of how travel is 'the saddest of pleasures'.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

On the tracks of 'The Great Railway Bazaar'

A vastly diverse and geographically scattered nation of forty million people, Canada is now threatened with annexation as the 51st state by the US President, beyond the longest undefended border in the world. This threat has had the effect of unifying the nation, inspiring patriotism, and encouraging the normally laconic Canadians to be forthcoming, ideal for a traveller with a gift for listening. 
 
For Theroux, this journey is also personal: his ancestor Antoine Theroux left Gascony in 1693 to become a pioneer in Nouvelle France and to settle in the small village of Yamaska, where many Therouxs still live and thrive. He recounts the riveting story of Antoine, illuminating the deeper, and often darker, history of Canada, before hitting the road from Yamaska, to explore the length and breadth of the country. 
 
From the farthest east in Newfoundland to the west in Vancouver, Theroux travels the highways linking Quebec, Montreal, Toronto and the huge cities of the prairies – an archipelago of urban islands, surrounded by vast, often pristine landscapes. Along the way he meets farmers and fishermen, writers and activists, new immigrants and old timers – each a vital part of this True North, each hoping for it to remain strong and free. 
 
With his remarkable gift for description and narrative, and his zest for the open road, Paul Theroux remains the most compelling, searching and evocative of travel writers.

True North

Drawing together classic Theroux pieces from the past 14 years, this new collection offers a comprehensive and deeply searching portrait of its acclaimed author - a kind of autobiography through work. 
 
Figures in a Landscape ranges from profiles of cultural icons (Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams) to intimate personal remembrances; from thrilling adventures in Africa to literary writings from Theroux's rich and expansive personal reading. Collectively these pieces build up a fascinating portrait of Paul Theroux's restless, ever-curious mind.

Figures in a Landscape

People and Places

Sunrise with Sea Monsters is Paul Theroux's immensely entertaining collection of his shorter writings, ranging from sketches to critical essays. Each piece marks a new 'confrontation with the world' and throws new light on the political and social climate of diverse cultures such as those of New York, Singapore, Ireland and Malawi. Others give a lively portrayal of the people Theroux has met or books and landscapes which have inspired him. 
 
Above all, this is a fascinating perspective on two decades of travelling, writing and living away from home.

Sunrise With Seamonsters

Travels And Discoveries 1964-1984

The Orient Express; The Khyber Pass Local; the Delhi Mail from Jaipur; the Golden Arrow of Kuala; the Trans-Siberian Express; these are just some of the trains steaming through Paul Theroux's epic rail journey from London across Europe through India and Asia. This was a trip of discovery made in the mid-seventies, a time before the West had embraced the places, peoples, food, faiths and cultures of the East. For us now, as much as for Theroux then, to visit the lands of The Great Railway Bazaar is an encounter with all that is truly foreign and exotic - and with what we have since lost.

The Great Railway Bazaar

By Train Through Asia

For the past fifty years, Paul Theroux has travelled to the far corners of the earth - to China, India, Africa, the Pacific Islands, South America, Russia and elsewhere - and brought them to life in his cool, exacting prose. 
 
In Deep South he turns his gaze to a region much closer to his home. Travelling through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, he writes of the stunning landscapes he discovers - the deserts, the mountains, the Mississippi - and above all, the lives of the people he meets.

Deep South

Four Seasons on Back Roads

After eleven years living as an American in London, Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise round the coast and find out what Britain and the British are really like. It was 1982, the summer of the Falklands War and the royal baby, and the ideal time, he found, to surprise the British into talking about themselves. The result is vivid and absolutely riveting reading. 
 
'A sharp and funny descriptive writer. One of his golden talents, perhaps because he is American and therefore classless in British eyes, is the ability to chat up and get on with all sorts ...' The Times.

The Kingdom by the Sea

A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

At the gateway to the Mediterranean lie the two Pillars of Hercules: Gibraltar and Ceuta, in Morocco. Paul Theroux decided to travel from one to the other &ndash; but taking the long way round. 
 
His grand tour of the Mediterranean begins in Gibraltar and takes him through Spain, the French Riviera, Italy, Greece, Istanbul and beyond. He travels by any means necessary - including dilapidated taxi, smoke-filled bus, bicycle and even a cruise-liner. And he encounters bullfights, bazaars and British tourists, discovers pockets of humanity in war-torn Slovenia and Croatia, is astounded by the urban developments on the Costa del Sol and marvels at the ancient wonders of Delphi. 
 
Told with Theroux's inimitable wit and style, this lively and eventful tour evokes the essence of Mediterranean life.

The Pillars of Hercules

A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean

A family watches, horrified, as their patriarch transforms into the wise-cracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. An art collector gleefully destroys his most valuable pieces. A young artist devotes himself to a wealthy, malicious gossip, knowing that it's just a matter of time before she turns on him. 
 
In this new collection of short stories, Paul Theroux explores the tenuous leadership of the elite and the surprising revenge of the overlooked. He shows us humanity possessed, consumed by its own desires, always with his carefully honed eye and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life.

Mr Bones

Twenty Stories

Whether visiting the King of the Lozis at a bend in the Zambezi river or crossing the United States in a railway car of unsurpassable luxury, relating his experiments with biblical dieting, or detailing the illneses and diseases suffered in half a lifetime of travel, Paul Theroux, the fresh-air fiend himself, is always an entertaining and honest guide. 
 
Full of startling encounters and memorable scenes, fascinating and sometimes bizarre locations, and enlightening musings on themes as various as sexual attraction and the point of travel writing itself, this extensive collection of his shorter pieces is a rich and remarkable book from a superb writer.

Fresh-air Fiend

Travel Writings, 1985-2000

A compendium of travel writing from a master traveller 
 
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 traveller. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates 'The Contents of Some Travellers' Bags' and exposes 'Writers Who Wrote About Places They Never Visited'; tracks extreme journeys in 'Travel As An Ordeal' and highlights some of 'Travellers' Favourite Places'. Excerpts from the best of Theroux's own work are interspersed with selections from travellers both familiar and unexpected, including Vladimir Nabokov, Henry David Thoreau, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway and more. 
 
The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age.

The Tao of Travel

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The Old Patagonian Express tells of Paul Theroux&rsquo;s train journey down the length of North and South America. Beginning on Boston&rsquo;s subway, he depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina&rsquo;s most southerly tip, via pretty Central American towns and the ancient Incan city of Macchu Pichu. Shivering and sweating by turns as the temperature and altitude rise and plummet, he describes the people he encountered &ndash; thrown in with the tedious, and unavoidable, Mr Thornberry in Lim&oacute;n and reading to the legendary blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires. Witty, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a richly evocative account of travelling to &lsquo;the end of the line&rsquo;.

The Old Patagonian Express

By Train Through the Americas

There is a short period in everyone's life when his character is fixed forever . . . ' George Orwell 
 
Eric Blair stood out amongst his fellow police trainees in 1920s Burma. Nineteen years old, unusually tall, a diffident loner fresh from Eton, after five years spent in the narrow colonial world of the Raj – a decaying system steeped in overt racism and petty class-conflict – he would emerge as the George Orwell we know. 
 
Drawing on all his powers of observation and imagination, Paul Theroux brings Orwell's Burma years to radiant life, tracing the development of the young man's consciousness as he confronts the social, racial and class politics and the reality of Burma beyond. Through one writer, we come to understand another - and see how what Orwell called 'five boring years within the sound of bugles' were in fact the years that made him.

Burma Sahib

'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.'  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, the stories 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.

The Collected Stories

World's End; Sinning with Annie; Jungle Bells; the Consul's File; the London Embassy;

A young American walks into Sicily's Palazzo d'Oro during the '60s. Penniless, but swaggering with youth and burgeoning artistic talent, he accepts a proposition to become the companion to a beautiful and beguiling aristocrat. Their affair - formal and restrained by day, torrid and passionate by night - leads him to a place where nothing, not even his lover, is what it seems. This novella and three other tales explore the underbelly of sexual desire and together make up one of Paul Theroux's most compelling works yet.

The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro

The stories in The Vanishing Point are both exotic and domestic, their settings ranging from Hawaii to Africa and New England. Each focuses on life’s vanishing points—a moment when seemingly all lines running through one’s life converge, and one can see no farther, yet must deal with the implications. With the insight, subtlety, and empathy that has long characterized his work, Theroux has written deeply moving stories about memory, longing, and the passing of time, reclaiming his status, once again, as a master of the form.

The Vanishing Point

The fictional narrator of these memoirs, a man of many different guises, has reconstructed his past, giving it wit and life, tragedy and pathos, and imposed an order on it through careful editing. Life, it seems, has no apparent plot and so it can seem messier than fiction; sometimes it seems as if our hero is leading many different, separate lives . . . 
 
'A memoir; a collection of short stories; an assemblage of fables; an anthology of Theroux: a book in which he is everywhere present, as himself and as someone other . . . Endlessly inventive, beguiling, provocative and insidiously readable' Sunday Telegraph

My Other Life

A Novel

Joe Sharkey knows he is passed his prime. 
 
 Now in his sixties, the younger surfers around the breaks on the north shore of Oahu still revere him as the once-legendary 'Shark', but his sponsors have moved on, and Joe wonders what new future awaits him on the horizon. Uninterrupted quality time with the ocean, he hopes. 
 
 Life has other plans. 
 
 When he accidentally hits and kills a man near Waimea while drunk-driving, he fears he will never rebound. Under the direction of his stubbornly loyal girlfriend Olive, he throws himself into uncovering his victim's story. But what they find in Max Mulgrave is entirely unexpected: a shared history - and refuge in the sea. 
 
 Set on the stunning Hawaiian coast, Theroux captures the glory and nostalgia of looking back at a rich and adventurous past, whilst learning to ride out life's next unexpected wave.

Under the Wave at Waimea

This fabulous, far-reaching book breathtakingly captures the tumult, ambition, hardship and serenity that mark modern India. 
 
Theroux&rsquo;s characters risk venturing far beyond its well-worn paths to discover woe or truth or peace. A holidaying middle-aged couple veer heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds relief in Mumbai&rsquo;s reeking slums. A young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore. We also meet Indian characters as distinctive as they are indicative of their country&rsquo;s subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is transformed by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and more. 
 
The Elephanta Suite urges us towards a fresh, compelling, and often inspiring notion of India and its effect on those who try to lose &mdash; or find &mdash; themselves there.

The Elephanta Suite

'Both unputdownable and utterly engaging' Jonathan Raban, The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'I started reading Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, the story of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul over thirty years and five continents - its origins, development, and sad, enigmatic termination. I couldn't, as they say, put it down. I don't know of a more revealing study of the peculiar nature of friendship between professional writers, an unstable compound of empathy, solidarity and rivalry. Theroux's portrait of Naipaul . . . may be [his] finest literary creation' David Lodge, Guardian Books of the Year 
 
'Thoroughly compelling. We can call it a memoir, or a biographical sketch, but it has more in it - more candour, more intensity, more angry puzzlement - than we would normally expect from either of these genres. I can think of no other book that renders in such merciless detail a still-living public figure' Sunday Telegraph

Sir Vidia's Shadow

A Friendship Across Five Continents

'Nothing on the shelf has quite prepared the reader for My Secret History . . . Parent saunters into the book aged fifteen, shouldering a .22 Mossberg rifle as earlier, more innocent American heroes used to tote a fishing pole. In his pocket is a paperback translation of Dante's Inferno . . . He is a creature of naked and unquenchable ego, greedy for sex, money, experience, another life' Jonathan Raban, Observer

My Secret History

Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilization and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness. 
 
'An epic of paranoid obsession that swirls the reader headlong to deposit him on a mudbank of horror' Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian.

The Mosquito Coast

Everyone in Cape Cod thinks that Mother is a wonderful woman: pious, hard-working, frugal. Everyone except her husband and seven children. To them she is a selfish and petty tyrant -- endlessly comparing her many living children to the one who died in childbirth, keeping a vice-like hold on her offspring even as they try to escape into adulthood. 
 
Welcome to Mother Land: a suffocating kingdom of parental narcissism. This is an engrossing, hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of a modern family -- the bickering, the conspiracies, and the drive to overcome the painful ties that bind.

Mother Land

There's sibling rivalry and then there's the relationship of brothers Cal and Frank Belanger. 
 
Enemies since childhood, the small town of Littleford just isn't big enough to hold them both. So, Cal strikes out for the world's wild places - a gifted geologist in search of gold and other precious minerals - leaving Frank to develop a successful career as the town's lawyer, fixer and local hero. 
 
But when Cal, newly rich and newlywed, returns to the town of his birth, Frank gives him the opposite of a brotherly welcome, leading to a series of betrayals and reprisals culminating in the ultimate plan: murder. 
 
A riveting tale of adventure, betrayal and the true cost of family bonds, The Bad Angel Brothers is a remarkable novel from one of American's most distinctive writers.

The Bad Angel Brothers

Fourteen-year-old Jilly Farina walks into the tent at the County Fair and finds her life transformed. Fixing her with his hypnotic gaze, Millroy the Magician performs astonishing miracles. When she is later magicked into his trailer and Millroy promises to train her as his assistant, Jilly feels safe for the first time in her short life. 
 
But Millroy is more than a mere stage show magician. A vegetarian and health fanatic, a possessor of healing and hypnotic powers, Millroy's mission is to change the eating habits of an entire nation. And through Jilly he has found the strength to preach his evangelical message. 
 
With Millroy's messianic fervour ever growing, Jilly begins to have doubts - but Millroy knows that without Jilly there will be no magic . . .

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