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...

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...

Sixty-two-year-old Ellis Hock's family has abandoned him, he and hopes to rekindle his youthful happiness in Malawi where he taught school forty years earlier, but in Malawi he finds the old school in ruins and the people apathetic.

Disgusted with modern American culture, Allie Fox takes his family to live in the jungles of Central America.

"A Vonnegut tinged absurdist satire . . . (a) tightly paced, expertly drawn comic romp" from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Mosquito Coast (LitReactor). Paul Theroux, one of the world's most popular authors, both for his travel books and his fiction, has produced an off-beat story of 1960s weirdos unlike anything he has ever written. During the time of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, Herbie Gneiss is forced to leave college to get...

"From legendary writer Paul Theroux comes an atmospheric novel following a big-wave surfer as he confronts aging, privilege, mortality, and whose lives we choose to remember"-- Now in his sixties, big-wave surfer Joe Sharkey has passed his prime and is losing his 'stoke.' The younger surfers around the breaks on the north shore of Oahu still idolize the Shark, but his sponsors are looking elsewhere. Driving home from a bar after one too many, Joe...

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates "The Contents of Some Travelers' Bags" and exposes "Writers Who Wrote about Places They Never Visited"; tracks extreme journeys in "Travel as an Ordeal" and highlights some of "Travelers' Favorite Places." Excerpts...

A collection of essays and articles in which Paul Theroux reflects on his traveling experiences.