Overview

""Sayarer is a precise and passionate writer . . . The vast energy of his commitment to discover, observe and communicate makes for engrossing, often incandescent prose. We need writers who will go all the way for a story, and tell it with fire. Sayarer is a marvellous example"" HORATIO CLARE On the small island of Surin, near the naval border of Thailand and Myanmar, an indigenous people known as Moken 'sea gypsies' struggle to maintain the same timeless existence as their ancestors. As real estate developers, oil exploration and industrial tourism reshape the waters they call home, Sayarer receives a mysterious offer from an idealistic Luxembourger determined to tell a tale of the Moken on film, and in search of a writer to detail the efforts of his motley crew. Events unfold in a reality strangely different to that version captured by the lens. In the quest for indigenous wisdom, cameras and tripods clutter bamboo huts, while fishing trips and dives are staged beneath the waves. With the quest for paradise seeming ever more artificial, award-winning author, Julian Sayarer instead begins listening to the stories of Laurie, an old sailor, with a life on the water behind him, and in whose ship the crew sail out into the Andaman Sea.

Full Product Details

9781911350231

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Perhaps not since Alex Garland's The Beach has backpacker culture been so aptly captured, put on display and ruthlessly critiqued.' * Geographical Magazine * Book of the Month * Royal Geographical Society *

Book of the Month * Royal Geographical Society * 'Perhaps not since Alex Garland's The Beach has backpacker culture been so aptly captured, put on display and ruthlessly critiqued.' * Geographical Magazine *

`On The Road for the Occupy generation' Open Democracy; `A brilliantly thoughtful writer' Sara Wheeler

Author Information

JULIAN SAYARER cycled a half dozen times across Europe to his second nation of Turkiye before before breaking a world record for a circumnavigation by bicycle, and going on to write Life Cycles (2014). He is the winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Writing Award for Interstate (2016), an account of hitchhiking through middle America, and is the author of Messengers (2016), All at Sea (2017), Fifty Miles Wide (2020), Ondaatje Prize-longlisted Iberia (2021), and Turkiye (2023). Julian combines a background in political science to create a critically acclaimed travel writing style - politics at roadsides. In this 12mph view of the world in passing, he uses human stories and journeys to document global issues for a broad audience. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Financial Times, Aeon Magazine, and in numerous cycling publications.

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