Introduced by Jeet Thayli, author of Booker Prize shortlisted novel Narcopolis. At the age of 20, Dom Moraes - already a celebrated poet who would go on to be regarded as one of India's finest writers - returned to his native India after finishing education in England. After spending time in Delhi, meeting Jawaharlal Nehru and the young Dalai Lama, he embarked on a meandering journey through northern India, Nepal and Sikkim at a time of political tension and the threat of invasion by China. Brilliant, curious and precocious, seldom without a drink in his hand, he chanced his way into some extraordinary situations - including staying in a Nepalese palace with a resident bear and being shot at and chased by Chinese soldiers. Gone Away details these adventures with a poet's eye for detail, and the luminosity and humour for which Moraes was known.

He begins in the dense woods roamed by wild tigers and panthers. He begins with a little native boy whose large eyes open and see his changing country with mild curiosity and at times shocking fear. Dom Moraes borrows this pair of eyes to see his world the way he sees it, and then tell you a story. In this entertaining and witty mix of history, diary and the ramifications of the modern age the story of the land of Karnataka is told through the eyes of many people. Following the paths gazed by these eyes, Moraes's personal experiences bring out the feel and smell of the place, but more, the hope. Karnataka has layers of culture, civilization and history and it is this, the enthralling and enigmatic features of this ancient-modern state, that the author sets out to trace and move more through time than space. He tells the story with the ease of a preoccupied traveller who shifts between past and present because he believes they cannot be separate. Watching the roads and rivers that loop and whorl through the land, he travels through the rivers that flow constantly through the minds of its people. And more importantly, through his own. Until his eyes become a sum of theirs and of that little native boy's when the beginning began.