Paul Theroux writes about travel with an approach that sets standards for the genre. The locations which attract him are attractive in ambivalent ways – politically troubled, socially dysfunctional, or economically idiosyncratic – locations of geopolitical simmering enlivened by his empathy with local lives.

This book is the sequel to Theroux’s career-making 1973 railway adventure, a looping journey across Eastern Europe and the greater Asia continent. In 2006, Theroux relived the same route in railways carriages, sitting rooms and dining halls across the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central, South, Southeast and East Asia. In a region historically and repeatedly torn apart and put together, Theroux describes experiences of change through conversations with ordinary and extraordinary people. Patrician, pedestrian and peasant companions of this sequel journey include writers Orhan Parmuk, Haruki Murakami and the late Arthur C. Clarke; oppressed Turkmenistans and Singaporeans; unhappy Georgians and desperate Indians.

With the same acidity with which he once lacerated former friend V.S. Naipaul, Theroux’s work works because of a lack of inhibition, a willingness to speculate and a discipline for turning naïve observations into cynical provocations.