Colin Thubron

Desde Xian, en el corazón de China, a Antioquía, pasando por las montañas del Asia central y las llanuras de Irán, Colin Thubron recorre once mil kilómetros en ocho meses en busca de la mayor ruta comercial terrestre del mundo, aquella gracias a la cual llegaron a Occidente no solo la seda, sino tambien el papel, la polvora, el estribo o la brida.En autobus, tren, carro y camello, el autor atraviesa un enorme entramado de arterias que se separan y convergen a lo largo y ancho del continente asiatico, rastreando no solo las travesias historicas del comercio y los ejercitos, sino tambien de las ideas, las religiones y los inventos. A este relato se suman testimonios fascinantes que retratan una magnifica vision de un mundo antiguo expuesto a la agitacion de la era moderna, donde los verdaderos limites no son politicos, sino tribales, etnicos, linguisticos y religiosos.Uno de los mejores escritores de viajes de nuestro tiempo. Jacinto Anton, El PaisCon su tono elegiaco, esta obra resulta conmovedora de un modo que no es habitual en este tipo de literatura. The New York Times

TOP TEN BESTSELLERMount Kailas is the most sacred of the worlds mountains - holy to one fifth of humanity.

It began with a spark...A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and a photographer. Their landlord''s relationship to them is both intimate and shadowy. At times he shares their obsessions and memories. He will also share their fate.The passions of these individuals reach beyond the dying house that holds them. One recalls a lonely childhood, another the cremation grounds of India, another an African refugee camp. But will their stories be consumed forever by the flames?

Written in lovely prose, this book displays all the skills for which Thubron is renowned: scholarship, sensitivity, sensibility and a magical mix of fascinating experiences in the present and extraordinary evocations of the past. Armed with only a notebook the book is illustrated only with maps but writing as vivid as this needs no illustrations.

Described by the author as simply ''a work of love'', Mirror To Damascus provides an enthralling and fascinating history of Damascus from the Amorites of the Bible to the revolution of 1966, as well a being a charming and witty personal record of a city well-loved.In explaining how modern Damascus is rooted in immemoriable layers of culture and tradition, Colin Thubron explores the historical, artistic, social and religious inheritance of the Damascenes in an amusing and perceptive manner, whilst interspersing the narrative with innumerable anecdotes about travellers of bygone days.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.

For four months and five hundred miles the author walked the mountains of Lebanon, following tracks and rivers. His journey was not only a survey of a remarkable country, but a quest for the gods and divinities who held the secrets of death and rebirth in the lands ancient cults. This title tells his story.

Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron set off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to the borders of Burma.

VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mindOn buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. A magnificent account of an ancient world in modern ferment, Thubron covers over 7000 miles in eight months Thubron enduring a near-miss with a drunk-driver, incarceration in a Chinese cell, and undergoing root canal treatment without anaesthetic, along the way.

The greatness, the very existence of Venice, was bound up with the sea - a scattering of harbours and islands along vital maritime ways. Its prosperity was based in twin enterprises: naval war and marine commerce. And these, in turn, depended, for much of its history, on two very different types of ship.