When a part-time worker in a mental hospital meets his old girlfriend inside he is not sure at first is she is a patient. Their reunion is haunted and haunting, and from the memory of their past affair there unfolds a labyrinth which darkens from romantic obsession to feelings deeper and more disturbing.

Beautifully packaged reissue of Colin Thubron's classic which bring the whole of his backlist into Vintage,
The people, their history and the beauty of an island on the brink of tragedy.
This is the account of a unique journey -- a six-hundred-mile trek on foot around Cyprus in the last year of the island's peace. Colin Thubron intertwines myth, history and personal anecdote in a quest from which the characters and places, architecture and landscape all spring vividly to the reader's eye.

This work is set deep in the Peruvian Andes, where five ill-prepared travellers - men and women with different values, temperaments and motives - find themselves trekking through one of the most exacting and beautiful regions on Earth.

This is the incredible account of Thubron's 15,000-mile journey, by train, river and truck, among the people most damaged by the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is the story of a people moving through the ruins of Communism into more private, diverse and often stranger worlds.

Thubron travelled throughout Central Asia in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union and documented the widespread social upheaval in a region reeling from political change. An inspirational writer, intrepid traveller and insightful observer, Thubron s The Lost Heart of Asia is an outstanding guide to the history, people and culture of a vast region resonating with history and politics."

Presents an account of a solitary journey by car from St Petersburg and the Baltic States south to Georgia and Armenia. This book presents a revealing account of the habits and idiosyncrasies of a fascinating nation along with a sharp and insightful social commentary of Russian life.

Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron sets off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to Tibet, starting from a tropical paradise near the Burmese border to the windswept wastes of the Gobi desert and the far end of the Great Wall. What Thubron reveals is an astonishing diversity, a land whose still unmeasured resources strain to meet an awesome demand, and an ancient people still reeling from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.

The Hills of Adonis is not only a masterfully-written travel book but also a personal quest for meaning by the author.
Ostensibly this is a book about Lebanon, finely written and deeply felt -- not the Lebanon that a Beirut businessman would recognize, but a coastline of small historic ports and a littoral of beautiful mountains. In this country, the ruins of Phoenician, Greek and Roman are among the most impressive in the world. Crusader castles and Arab palaces stand together in the hills, and the people are a unique medley of races and religions.
For five hundred miles the author...

Mirror to Damascus is a unique portrait of a city now obscured by recent upheavals, by one of the most indefatigable and popular of travel writers.
Described by the author as simply "a work of love," Mirror to Damascus is an enthralling and fascinating history of Damascus from the Amorites of the Bible to the revolution of 1966, as well as being a charming and witty personal record of a city well-loved.
In explaining how modern Damascus is rooted in immemorial layers of culture and tradition, Thubron explores the historical, artistic, social and religious inheritance of...

In this book, Colin Thubron travels to Tibet, and takes the pilgrimage route to Kailas, the most sacred of the world's mountains, holy to one fifth of the Earth's people, but rarely visited by Westerners.