The Great Railway Bazaar is Paul Theroux's account of his epic journey by rail through Asia. Filled with evocative names of legendary train routes; the Direct-Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail from Jaipur, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto and the Trans-Siberian Express; it describes the many places, cultures, sights and sounds he experienced and the fascinating people he met. Here he overhears snippets of chat and occasional monologues, and is drawn into conversation with fellow passengers, from Molesworth, a British theatrical agent, and Sadik, a shabby Turkish tycoon, while avoiding the forceful approaches of pimps and drug dealers. This wonderfully entertaining travelogue pays loving tribute to the romantic joys of railways and train travel.

The Great Railway Bazaar

Brought to you by Penguin. From the bestselling novelist, travel writer, and “master of the short story” (NPR) comes a brilliant new collection. 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. © Paul Theroux 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

The Vanishing Point

Brought to you by Penguin. From renowned author Paul Theroux comes the fascinating, atmospheric tale of George Orwell's years in Burma 'There is a short period in everyone's life when his character is fixed forever . . . ' George Orwell Before George Orwell was Orwell - the pen name he took on becoming a writer - he was Eric Blair, an unlikely policeman in Burma. 19 years old, unusually tall, highly intelligent, a diffident loner fresh from Eton, Blair stood out amongst his fellow trainees in 1920s Mandalay. It was here, over five years in the narrow colonial world of the Raj - a decaying system steeped in overt racism and petty class-conflict - that Eric Blair became the George Orwell we know: an anti-imperialist, a socialist and a writer of rare commitment. The inner journey he made in these years is remarkable, but in the absence of letters or diaries from the period, this richly complex transformation can only be told in fiction, as it is here by Paul Theroux, in one of his most striking and accomplished novels. Drawing on all his powers of observation and imagination, Theroux brings Orwell's Burma years to radiant life, tracing the development of the young man's consciousness as he confronts both the social, racial and class politics of his colonial colleagues, and the reality of the Burma beyond, which he yearns to grasp. Through one writer, we come to understand another - and to see how what Orwell called 'five boring years within the sound of bugles' were in fact the years that made him. 'Always a terrific teller of tales and conjurer of exotic locales' Sunday Times 'The most gifted, most prodigal writer of his generation' Jonathan Raban ©2024 Paul Theroux (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Burma Sahib

The Old Patagonian Express tells of Paul Theroux’s train journey down the length of North and South America. Beginning on Boston’s subway, he depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina’s most southerly tip. Shivering and sweating by turns as the temperature and altitude rise and plummet, he describes the people he encountered – the tedious Mr Thornberry in Limón and reading to the legendary blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires.

The Old Patagonian Express

NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES Winner of the Stanford Dolman Lifetime Contribution to Travel Writing Award 2020 The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Stanford Dolman Lifetime Contribution to Travel Writing Award - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux. Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation 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. 'Stunning. . . exciting, intelligent, meticulously realised, artful' Victoria Glendinning, Sunday Times 'An epic of paranoid obsession’ Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian 'Magnificently stimulating and exciting' Anthony Burgess

The Mosquito Coast

A final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers Journeying alone, in what he feels will be his last African journey, Paul Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of post-colonial independence movements. Having travelled down the right-hand side of Africa in Dark Star Safari, he sets out this time from Cape Town, heading northwards up the left-hand side, through South Africa and Namibia, to Botswana, heading for the Congo, in search of the end of the line.

The Last Train to Zona Verde

Drawing together a fascinating body of writing from over 14 years of 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 offer a fascinating portrait of the author himself, his extraordinary life, restless and ever-curious mind. Figures in a Landscape is an essential addition to the wide-ranging Theroux canon, bound together by an extended mediation on the craft of writing itself, and driven by Theroux's constant quest for the authentic in a person or in a place.

Figures in a Landscape

In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Paul Theroux retraces the steps he took thirty years ago in his classic The Great Railway Bazaar. From the Eurostar in London, he once again sets out on a journey to the East, travelling overland through Eastern Europe, India and Asia. Infused with the changes that have shaped the exterior landscape and enriched with developments to his own perceptions and psychology, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is an absorbing and beautifully written follow-up to The Great Railway Bazaar.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

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.

Mother Land

For the past fifty years, Paul Theroux has travelled to the far corners of the earth - to China, Africa, the Pacific Islands, Russia, and elsewhere. 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

This fabulous, far-reaching book breathtakingly captures the tumult, ambition, hardship and serenity that mark modern India. Theroux'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'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'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

Brought to you by Penguin. A deliciously dark, atmospheric novel about family and brotherhood from one of America's most distinctive writers There's sibling rivalry and then there's the relationship of brothers Cal and Frank Belanger, which takes fraternal antipathy to a whole new level. Enemies seemingly since childhood, the small town of Littleford, where they are nicknamed 'The Bad Angle Brothers', 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. Apart, their differences are muted by distance, but when Cal, newly rich and newly wed, returns to the town of his birth, to buy a house and raise a family, Frank gives him the opposite of a brotherly welcome. From undermining Cal's marriage, while Cal is away on business, to torpedoing his finances, nothing is off the table, setting the scene for a tale of gleefully vicious betrayals and reprisals, culminating in the ultimate plan: murder. Few authors have as keen an eye for human nature as the inimitable Paul Theroux, and this riveting tale of adventure, betrayal, and the true cost of family bonds is a remarkable new work from one of America's most distinctive writers. © Paul Theroux 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

The Bad Angel Brothers

Award-winning writer Paul Theroux tells four exhilarating stories of desire in which nothing is as it seems in The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro. 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

Newly married and having recently taken over the management of a hotel in Honolulu, a former writer is drawn into the lives of his guests and the distinctive customs and rhythms of the distant island. As witness to the many contrasting chronicles of the hotel's characters, he ultimately returns to writing once again. The result is this novel in eighty distinct episodes, a Chaucerian sequence of strange pilgrims and islanders confronting each other and their fate, in the rooms of the seedy hotel.

Hotel Honolulu

When Jerry Delfont, a travel writer with writer's block, receives a letter from an American philanthropist, Mrs Merrill Unger, with news of a scandal involving an Indian friend of her son's, he is sufficiently intrigued to pursue the story. Jerry is swiftly captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Mrs Unger, but the circumstances surrounding the scandal cause him to doubt the exact nature of her philanthropy.

A Dead Hand

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.

Mr Bones

Ellis Hock runs a menswear store in Massachusetts but still dreams of the four years he spent in Malawi. When his wife leaves him, he realises that there is one place for him to go: back to Malawi on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again. Arriving at the dusty village he finds it transformed, but the locals remember him and welcome him back. Is his new life an escape or a trap? Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, this is a hypnotic, compelling and brilliant return to a terrain no one has written better about than Theroux.

The Lower River

It's 1960s America, and Herbie Gneiss is forced to leave college to get a job. Mr. Gibbon, a patriotic veteran of three wars, works with Herbie at Kant-Brake toy factory. When Herbie is drafted, Mr. Gibbon feels that he, too, should do something for his country; and so he decides to rob the Mount Holly Trust Company...

Murder in Mount Holly

The master of contemporary travel writing, Paul Theroux, immerses himself in the beautiful and troubled heart of modern Mexico Nogales is a border town caught between Mexico and the United States of America. A forty-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. Moving through the deserts just south of the Arizona border, Theroux finds a place brimming with charm, yet visibly marked by both the US border patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. Attending local language and culinary schools, driving through the country and meeting its people, Paul Theroux gets under the skin of Mexico. From the writer praised for his 'curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms' (New York Times Book Review), On The Plain of Snakes is an urgent and mesmerising exploration of a region in conflict. Praise for Paul Theroux: 'As cool as Maugham... as observant, intuitive, wry, inventive and eloquent as Graham Greene' Sunday Times 'Theroux's work remains the standard by which other travel writing must be judged' Observer 'The world's most perceptive travel writer' Daily Mail 'One of the most accomplished and worldly-wise writers of his generation' The Times

On the Plain of Snakes

Brought to you by Penguin. From renowned writer Paul Theroux comes a dazzling novel following a big-wave surfer in Hawaii as he confronts ageing, privilege, mortality, and whose lives we choose to remember 'It was as if in surfing he was carving his name in water, invisibly, joyously.' 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. 'There is very little that Paul Theroux cannot fit onto a page. His writing skills are disciplined and muscular, his ear as finely tuned as a musician's, his eye sharper than any razor, and, in pinpointing the bizarre and the unexpected, he both entertains and underlines the absurdity of humans' Daily Mail © Paul Theroux 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Under the Wave at Waimea

»Immer, wenn ich fedrig leichten Schnee langsam an einer Scheibe herunterrieseln sehe, der sich zu einem weißen Polster auf der Fensterbank türmt, und der Wind leise stöhnend durch eine Ritze in ein Zimmer drängt, wo Flammen im Kamin singen, muss ich an das Weihnachtsfest denken, an dem ich neun war, und an unser Haus in Indian Willows. Wir hatten uns verirrt.«Marcel, Louis und ihre Eltern wollen die Festtage zum ersten Mal in ihrem Ferienhaus am See verbringen, doch sie geraten in einen Schneesturm, und der Vater verfährt sich hoffnungslos im Wald. Endlich entdecken sie ein Haus, in dem noch Licht brennt. Ein eigenwilliger, alter Mann nimmt sie auf und verspricht, ihnen am nächsten Tag den Weg zu zeigen. Doch am Morgen ist der Mann fort. Aber er hat eine Weihnachtskarte hinterlassen, die sie zu ihrem Haus führen soll. Dass es sich dabei nicht um eine gewöhnliche Karte handelt, wissen nur Marcel …

Geisterhand

Es muss ein Zauber sein

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