Overview

Paul Theroux invites us to join him on one of his most exotic and tantalizing adventures exploring the coasts and blue lagoons of the Pacific Islands, and taking up residence to discover the secrets of these isles. Theroux is a mesmerizing narrator - brilliant, witty, keenly perceptive as he floats through Gauguin landscapes, sails in the wake of Captain Cook and recalls the bewitching tales of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson. Alone in his kayak, paddling to seldom visited shores, he glides through time and space, discovering a world of islands, their remarkable people, and in turn, happiness. 'A sharp, fascinating and highly entertaining book . Theroux at his best' Daily Telegraph.

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Engaging and at times brilliant...he goes places where the rest of us might fear to paddle, often beaching his kayak on a small South Pacific island without the foggiest idea whether those awaiting him will be friendly, indifferent, or anxious to give him a good thwack...well worth reading. USA Today<br><br> A superb blend of sharp-eyed observation and pungently expressed opinion. It's hardly paradise, this lovely part of the world, but Theroux makes it endlessly fascinating. Newsday<br><br> Feisty, eloquent, and vast in scope...a multilayered odyssey. The San Francisco Chronicle<br><br> Perceptive, terribly readable, and wickedly funny...[An] exhilarating book. --Book Review The Los Angeles Times

Perceptive, terribly readable, and wickedly funny...[An] exhilarating book. --Book Review A superb blend of sharp-eyed observation and pungently expressed opinion. It's hardly paradise, this lovely part of the world, but Theroux makes it endlessly fascinating. Feisty, eloquent, and vast in scope...a multilayered odyssey. Engaging and at times brilliant...he goes places where the rest of us might fear to paddle, often beaching his kayak on a small South Pacific island without the foggiest idea whether those awaiting him will be friendly, indifferent, or anxious to give him a good thwack...well worth reading. USA Today A superb blend of sharp-eyed observation and pungently expressed opinion. It's hardly paradise, this lovely part of the world, but Theroux makes it endlessly fascinating. Newsday Feisty, eloquent, and vast in scope...a multilayered odyssey. The San Francisco Chronicle Perceptive, terribly readable, and wickedly funny...[An] exhilarating book. --Book Review The Los Angeles Times

The peripatetic author of Riding the Iron Rooster, etc., etc., ventures with a collapsible kayak to the remote and scattered islands of the South Pacific. With a farewell to his marriage, and loneliness at his back, Theroux begins his extraordinary mission in New Zealand's Fiordland ( As long as there is wilderness there is hope ), moves on to Australia (a continent terrified by its own emptiness ), and then to Melanesia, Polynesia - Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, New Guinea's Trobriands, etc. - and, finally, Hawaii. He paddles the sea, he says, in the wake of myth-makers Melville, Stevenson, Gauguin, Maugham, and the Frenchman Captain Bougainville, who, in 1768, believed he'd found not only the Garden of Eden but Venus when a barebreasted Tahitian girl climbed into his ship from a canoe. To keen-eyed Theroux, the Polynesian islands are pleasant and feckless but far from paradise. Even Gauguin's Marquesas are dramatic at a distance but close up - muddy and jungly and priest-ridden. Traditional islands are riddled with magic, superstition, myths, dangers, rivalries and its old routines. Always interesting are Theroux's encounters with archaeologists who have disproved Thor Heyerdahl's popularizing theories about Polynesia. Sifting through human and animal bones, they study a still-mysterious people who carved some 800 stone statues on Easter Island and who boasted navigational skills that sent them migrating during what was Europe's Dark Ages. A sense of being beyond the reach of civilization comes when, in his intrepid kayak, off Easter Island and between the rock-battering surf and the Pacific, Theroux removes his headphones, hears the immense mar of waves and the screaming wind, and is terrified. A vast and contemplative book, seeing the Pacific as a universe, and the islands like stars in all that space. Informative not only for the voyager, but also for those wanting a new perspective on the Western continents of home. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Paul Theroux has written many works of fiction and travel writing, including the modern classics The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, My Secret History and The Mosquito Coast. He won the Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing 2020. Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.

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