GAVIN YOUNG

Empeñado en realizar una travesía al estilo de los viejos marinos, Gavin Young empleó veintitrés embarcaciones de los más diversos tipos y siete meses de viaje para llegar desde El Pireo hasta Cantón. El relato de este largo periplo consigue trasladar la atmosfera de los lugares, olores, conversaciones, barcos y tipos humanos que el autor va encontrando en su excepcional recorrido.Gavin Young estudio Historia Moderna en Oxford y se empleo dos años en una compañia naviera en Irak antes de partir a destinos mas remotos de los cuales ha dejado constancia en sus novelas de aventuras, Return to the Marshes. Mas adelante fue corresponsal de guerra en numerosos conflictos. En 1991 publico In Search of Conrad, fascinado por la figura de Joseph Conrad. Una lenta travesia (1981) es un clasico de la literatura de viajes.

It was the legendary traveller Wilfred Thesiger who first introduced Gavin Young to the Marshes of Iraq. Since then Young has been entranced by both the beauty of the Marshes and by the Marsh Arabs who inhabit them, a people whose lifestyle is almost unchanged from that of their predecessors, the Ancient Sumerians.On his return to the Marshes some years later Gavin Young found that the twentieth-century had rudely intruded on this lifestyle and that war was threatening to make the Marsh Arabs existence extinct. Return to the Marshes, first published in 1977, is at once a moving tribute to a unique way of life as well as a love story to a place and its people. A superbly written essay which combines warmth of personal tone, a good deal of easy historical scholarship and a talent for vivid description rarely found outside good fiction. Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times

In 1946 Roy Farrell and Syd de Kantzows beloved, battered wartime DC-3 touched down in Shanghai for the first time. On board was a cargo of morning coats and toothbrushes from New York, forging the first post-war supply route across the treacherous eastern Himalayas. The international airline now known as Cathay Pacific was born.Gavin Young tells the swashbuckling story of an empire of the air, a thrilling, action-packed adventure that began in an era closer to Biggles and biplanes held together by wire and safety pins than to our own.Pioneers like Farrell and de Kantzow would have had plenty of time to enjoy the dawn over Kangchebjunga. Would thye think of us with envy or contempt, cruising seven miles up with hundreds of passengers, air-conditioning, i-flight concerts, movies, hot four-course meals with an elaborate wine line and all mod-cons? . . . All this in forty years! Could the world have changed so much and so fast? This is Gavin Young himself eloquently reflecting on the extraordinary changes in air travel. There can be little doubt where his own sympathies lie.

Seven months and twenty-three agreeably ill-assorted vessels are what were required to transport Gavin Young, by slow boat, from Piraeus to Canton. His odyssey teemed with excitement, adventure and colour. Gavin Youngs account memorably distils the people, places, smells, conversations, ships and history of the places he encountered in what is his most famous book. The sequel, Slow Boats Home, is also reissued in Faber Finds.

In this, the sequel to Slow Boats to China (also reissued in Faber Finds), Gavin Young tells, with equal panache, of his return voyage from the China Seas to England, via the South Seas, Cape Horn and West Africa.I am decidedly envious of Gavin Young and his Slow Boats Home, successor to his highly entertaining Slow Boats to China . . . a fascinating, memorable book. Eric Newby, GuardianLike Slow Boats to China this is likely to become a classic of travel. Francis King, Spectator