Since childhood, books have been an endless source of inspiration. They can transport us to unknown worlds and show us fascinating places we have never visited. Many encourage us to travel and discover those places first-hand. Today we take a brief tour of books that could help you choose a destination in Asia.
Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin
One of the oldest and most brutal dictatorships governs Burma. Ironies of fate, that's where George Orwell served as an Imperial Police officer. “Animal Farm” and “1984” anticipated the current total control of the population by several decades. That is why many Burmese people know the English writer as “The Prophet». Emma Larkin, with Orwell’s works in her pocket, follows the writer’s footsteps and visits the places where he lived: Mandalay, the muddy delta of the Irrawaddy River, the port city of Moulmein and the northern mountains. His account reveals a side of the country the military government wants to conceal: a hidden world whispered about, passed around in covered books and hanging in the air like fragrant steam in teahouses.
A Fortune Teller Told Me, by Tiziano Terzani
The story itself promises: after the prediction of a fortune teller who advises him not to fly in 1993, this Italian journalist correspondent of Der Spiegel in Asia, he embarks on the adventure of doing his work without flying, travelling instead by train, boat or any other means of land transport. With Tiziano, a keen observer of life and people, we can travel through Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mongolia; and from there by Trans-Siberian train to Moscow. “A Fortune-Teller Told Me” also takes us through the Asian spirituality through its fortune tellers. Interestingly, Terzani’s initial scepticism gradually gives way to a conversion that remains with him until the end of his life.
Shadow of the Silk Road, by Colin Thurbon
The British Colin Thurbon is one of the finest living travel writers, a master of prose and character study who transports us in this book to the longest and most legendary route on earth. Personally, I prefer his travel writing to his novels. Colin spent two years travelling, with breaks, through Asia without avoiding any country or conflict. It offers a masterful account of the peoples and nations they encountered along the Caravan routes.
The city of joy, of Dominique Lapierre
A French priest, a young American doctor, a nurse Assam and an Indian peasant who makes a living pulling a rickshaw meet one day beneath a monsoon downpour and settle in the extraordinary setting of a neighbourhood in Calcutta to care, help and save. Destined to be heroes, they struggle and triumph amid floods, rats, scorpions, eunuchs, gods, festivities and the seventy thousand lights that fill The City of Joy. Their epic is a love song, a hymn to life and a lesson in tenderness and hope for everyone today.
For the Love of India by Catherine Clement
Many will discover in the pages of this historical book that Pandit Nehru, a leader of the independence movement in India, and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, the viceroy’s wife, had a love affair that scandalised the aristocracy British. This intense romance awakens in Edwina a deep feeling for India, revealing the humanity of its people and customs, while its extraordinary cities leave an indelible mark on her heart. In ‘For the Love of India’, the author tells this remarkable love story against the background of the country's struggle for independence and the division that separated the subcontinent into two countries: India and Pakistan.
The legacy of the Khmer Rouge, by Mark Aguirre
This book addresses how a small and poor country of Southeast Asia now confronts, thirty years later, one of the darkest and most tragic events in twentieth-century history. The period when the Khmer Rouge wanted to rebuild from the rice fields a Cambodia shattered by the American bombings. A regime where Utopia and genocide seem to be confused in the middle of the cold war. A period in which one third of its population died of bombings, political purges, forced labour, hunger and curable diseases.
The Quiet American by Graham Green
British journalist Thomas Fowler, American intelligence agent Alden Pyle and a young Annamese woman, Foung, form a complex triangle. Each represents opposing cultural outlooks and follows motives that the others misunderstand or cannot comprehend, leading to unintended behaviour. Interfering with these lives and decisively shaping them, the political climate and social life of Indochina, the struggle of Vietminh for independence, the French army’s fighting retreat and the US government’s initial moves to assume the dominant position the former colonial power would leave vacant after Dien Bien Phu, sometimes jumps to the foreground of the narrative: the attacks on the streets of Saigon and Hanoi, the battle of Phat Diem, the bombing of northern villages and ambushes in the rice fields of the Mekong delta are depicted in scenes of striking poignancy and authenticity
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