Colin Thubron

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?

"Brillante... Sophia recuerda a otras novelas ambientadas en el microcosmo de un hospital, La montaña mágica de Thomas Mann, El pabellón de cáncer de Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alguien voló sobre el nido del cuco de Ken Kesey" (New York Times Book Review).Daniel Pashley es un profesor de literatura que trabaja como voluntario en un hospital psiquiatrico. Alli cree reencontrar un dia a su antigua novia, Sofia, una mujer enigmatica que al principio rehuye todo contacto con el. Pashley insiste, curioso por saber su Sofia es una enfermera o una paciente del pabellon de agudos. Pronto concluye que, a pesar de todas las apariencias, Sofia se halla atrapada en el pabellon de las mujeres y necesita desesperadamente de su ayuda para escapar del hospital.Tan apasionante como una novela de suspense, Sophia ofrece una torturada vision de la inestabilidad emocional. Si Van Gogh o Munch hubieran sido novelistas, o Strindberg pintor, habrian creado paisajes mentales similares. Con una expresividad aterradora, Colin Thubron crea un mundo fantasmagorico que ejerce la misma fascinacion sobre el intelecto que sobre los sentidos.a

Al oeste de China, al sur de Rusia, rodeadas por las montañas, la estepa y el desierto, se encuentran las cinco repúblicas centroasiáticas de la antigua Unión Soviética que se independizarían de Moscu a comienzos de los 90: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tayikistan, Kazajstan y Kirguistan. Es este el momento que Colin Thubron escogio para visitarlas y conversar con sus habitantes sobre el pasado, el presente y el futuro, sobre la libertad recien hallada y su otra cara, la desesperanza y la nostalgia de certidumbres como las que habia ofrecido el pasado sovietico. Son muchas las historias y muchos los detalles de esta desconocida region de los Thubron da cuenta al tiempo que conversa o registra conversaciones sobre religiones y lenguas, sobre la madre patria y el poder ruso.

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.

Desde las primeras páginas de esta novela se nos desvela el final que aguarda a sus protagonistas, siete inquilinos de un mismo edificio de apartamentos—el casero, un pastor anglicano, un neurociruja

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.

Desde las primeras páginas de esta novela se nos desvela el final que aguarda a sus protagonistas, siete inquilinos de un mismo edi cio de apartamentos—el casero, un pastor anglicano, un neurociruja