For its twenty-fifth anniversary, a new edition of Bruce Chatwin's classic work with a new introduction by Rory Stewart

Part adventure, part novel of ideas, part spiritual autobiography, "The Songlines" is one of Bruce Chatwin's most famous books. Set in the desolate lands of the Australian Outback, it tells the story of Chatwin's search for the source and meaning of the ancient "dreaming tracks" of the Aborigines--the labyrinth of invisible pathways by which their ancestors "sang" the world into existence. This singular book, which was a "New York Times" bestseller when it was published in 1987, engages all of Chatwin's lifelong passions, including his obsession with travel, his interest in the nomadic way of life, and his hunger to understand man's origins and nature.

Chatwin's brilliantly unique record of his adventures in Patagonia and the fascinating people he meets along the way. Beautifully written and full of wonderful descriptions and intriguing tales, In Patagonia is an account of Bruce Chatwin's travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and his encounters with the people whose fascinating stories delay him on the road. VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

IN PATAGONIA is a Quest or a Wonder Voyage. It is about wandering andexile. Bruce Chatwin travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and, as he goes along, describes his encounters with other people whose stories delay him on the road.

A collected edition of Bruce Chatwin's acclaimed, captivating novels - On the Black Hill, Utz and The Viceroy of Ouidah - with an introduction by Hanya Yanagihara While Bruce Chatwin is best known as a master of travel literature, his three acclaimed novels must not be overlooked. Here we see a writer exploring human life, from its freedoms to its limits, in ever more exhilarating and unexpected ways. In On the Black Hill, twin brothers begin to realise that the world beyond their familiar fields is changing. In Utz, a scholar visits a communist state to meet an eccentric porcelain collector. And in The Viceroy of Ouidah, an ambitious slave trader makes a choice that could threaten his ultimate dream.

'Nothing in Chatwin's previous work prepares us for the dramatic intensity with which scene after scene of the novel is brought to light. He belongs, like Lawrence and Hardy before him, to that line of novelists, poets, diarists, and amateur naturalists who have made the rural life of Great Britain more intimately known to generations of readers than that of any country in Europe or America' New York Times Book Review.

In 1933, the delightfully eccentric travel writer Robert Byron set out on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to Oxiana, near the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Throughout, he kept a thoroughly captivating record of his encounters, discoveries, and frequent misadventures. His story would become a best-selling travel book throughout the English-speaking world, until the acclaim died down and it was gradually forgotten. When Paul Fussell published his own book Abroad, in 1982, he wrote that The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book what "Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry." His statements revived the public's interest in the book, and for the first time, it was widely available in American bookstores. Now this long-overdue reprint will introduce it to a whole new generation of readers. This edition features a new introduction by Rory Stewart, best known for his book The Places In Between, about his extensive travels in Afghanistan.
Today, in addition to its entertainment value, The Road to Oxiana also serves as a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now inaccessible to most Western travelers, and a nostalgic look back at a more innocent time.

With Chatwin, the real excitement derives from an intellectual drama, in dialogues about art as a surrogate creation, a robbery of divine power, and art collecting as idolatry...For Chatwin ideas are the supreme fictions.' Observer

'Not a word is wasted in the telling of this tale. Each sentence is fashioned, polished, and put into place with microscopic care.'

Daily Telegraph

'WHAT AM I DOING HERE (the question Rimbaud asked in Ethiopia), because it is more ragged than anything else he wrote, tells us more about him - his interests and friends, if not his passions. He writesof his father, of his friend...Howard Hodgkin, and his tete-a-tetes with Andre Malraux and Nadezhda Mandalstram...Ideally he gets a reallybizarre bee in his bonnet, such as a rumour of 'wolf-boy' in India, ora Chinese fengshui geomancer in Hong Kong, or the idea of looking for a Yeti, and he sets off and deals with it. At its most successful histravel is a search for an unholy grail - something freakish, plainly an excuse - and off he goes, and the piece is a winner' Paul Theroux, Telegraph

'Songlines' or 'Dreaming Tracks' are what all Europeans call the labyrinth of invisible pathways that meander all over Australia. To Aboriginals, they are the 'Footprints of the Ancestors'; they are bothintricate sources of personal identity and territorial markers. From such ancient line, Bruce Chatwin has been able to trace a great deal about an Aboriginal culture as complex as it is different from our own. The conflict between the two ways of life mirrors that within 'civilised' man himself. Disputes over the right to excavate land that is sacred to wandering tribes highlight the importance of myth and instinct in the human psyche. What might in other hands seem theatrically picaresque, Bruce Chatwin transforms into something approaching the scale of Greek tragedy...

The "spellbinding" (Los Angeles Times) second novel by the acclaimed author of The Songlines and In Patagonia Lewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm--sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors--farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers--are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress. Nevertheless, the twins' world--a few square miles of countryside--is rich in the oddities, the wonders, and the tragedies of the human experience. In this extraordinary novel, Bruce Chatwin has captured every nuance of the Welsh landscape and of the lives and souls of the people who live there.

In this vivid, powerful novel, Chatwin tells of Francisco Manoel de Silva, a poor Brazilian adventurer who sails to Dahomey in West Africa to trade for slaves and amass his fortune. His plans exceed his dreams, and soon he is the Viceroy of Ouidah, master of all slave trading in Dahomey. But the ghastly business of slave trading and the open savagery of life in Dahomey slowly consume Manoel's wealth and sanity.

In Patagonia is Bruce Chatwin’s exquisite account of his journey through “the uttermost part of the earth,” that stretch of land at the southern tip of South America, where bandits were once made welcome and Charles Darwin formed part of his “survival of the fittest” theory. Chatwin’s evocative descriptions, notes on the odd history of the region, and enchanting anecdotes make
In Patagonia an exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land. An instant classic upon publication in 1977, In Patagonia remains a masterwork of literature.

Although he is best known for his luminous reports from the farthest-flung corners of the earth, Bruce Chatwin possessed a literary sensibility that reached beyond the travel narrative to span a world of topics--from art and antiques to archaeology and architecture. This spirited collection of previously neglected or unpublished essays, articles, short stories, travel sketches, and criticism represents every aspect and period of Chatwin's career as it reveals an abiding theme in his work: his fascination with, and hunger for, the peripatetic existence. While Chatwin's poignant search for a suitable place to "hang his hat," his compelling arguments for the nomadic "alternative," his revealing fictional accounts of exile and the exotic, and his wickedly "en pointe" social history of Capri prove him to be an excellent observer of social and cultural mores, Chatwin's own restlessness, his yearning to be on the move, glimmers beneath every surface of this dazzling body of work.

Francisco Manoel da Silva, a poor Brazilian sailed to the African kingdom of Dahomey in the early 1800s, determined to make his fortune in the slave trade. Armed with nothing but an iron will, he became a man of substance in Ouidah, and friend to the mad, mercurial king. Itwas a relationship fraught with danger, and da Silva never made the triumphant return to Brazil of which he had dreamed. He did, however,found a remarkable dynasty; an enormous brood of mulatto children, allcalled da Silva, ensured that his name was still honoured by a highly miscellaneous clan over a century later, an outpost of Brazil in Africa...

In this text, Bruce Chatwin writes of his father, of his friend Howard Hodgkin, and of his talks with Andre Malraux and Nadezhda Mandelstram. He also follows unholy grails on his travels, such as the rumour of a "wolf-boy" in India, or the idea of looking for a Yeti.

Bruce Chatwin's bestselling novel traces the fortunes of Kaspar Utz, an enigmatic collector of Meissen porcelain living in Cold War Czechoslovakia. Although Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner of the Communist state and of his precious collection.