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Lonely Planet Better Than Fiction 1

Lonely Planet Better Than Fiction 1

True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers

by Alexander McCall SmithIsabel Allende Steven Amsterdam and others
Paperback
Publication Date: 01/11/2017

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"...a brilliant collection of travel stories...threaded with great warmth, as readers are invited to travel in the company of these famous authors and experience their passions and revelations." BOOKSELLER + PUBLISHER

We asked some of the world's most acclaimed fiction authors, including Isabel Allende, Peter Matthiessen, Alexander McCall Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, Tea Obreht and DBC Pierre, to describe their greatest non-fictional journeys. The 32 stories collected in Lonely Planet's Better than Fictiontouch on everything from disorientation and revelation to disillusion and redemption.

However, these real-life tales all share one common characteristic: a passion for the precious gift that travel confers, from its unexpected but inevitably enriching lessons about other peoples and places, to the truths it reveals about ourselves. By turns funny, poignant and thought-provoking, you'll be transported from Azerbaijan to Vietnam, via Iceland, India, Samoa, Scotland, Antarctica, Alaska, Argentina, Nicaragua, Rome, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and beyond.

Edited by travel writer Don George.

Also available:
Lonely Planet Better than Fiction 2

About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media co(more...)

ISBN:
9781787012660
9781787012660
Category:
Travel & holiday
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
01-11-2017
Language:
English
Publisher:
Lonely Planet Publications
Country of origin:
Australia
Dimensions (mm):
198.12x129.54x19.05mm
Weight:
0.28kg
Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith is one of the world’s most prolific and most popular authors. His career has been a varied one: for many years he was a professor of Medical Law and worked in universities in the United Kingdom and abroad.

Then, after the publication of his highly successful No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which has sold over twenty million copies, he devoted his time to the writing of fiction and has seen his various series of books translated into over forty languages and become bestsellers through the world.

The series include the Scotland Street novels, first published as a serial novel in The Scotsman, the Sunday Philosophy Club series starring Isabel Dalhousie, the von Igelfeld series, and the new Corduroy Mansions novels. Alexander is also the author of collections of short stories, academic works, and over thirty books for children.

He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the British Book Awards Author of the Year Award in 2004 and a CBE for service to literature in 2007. He holds honorary doctorates from nine universities in Europe and North America.

Alexander McCall Smith lives in Edinburgh. He is married to a doctor and has two daughters.

Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende is the author of twelve works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Maya"s Notebook, Island Beneath the Sea, Inés of My Soul, Daughter of Fortune, and a novel that has become a world-renowned classic, The House of the Spirits. Born in Peru and raised in Chile, she lives in California.

Steven Amsterdam

Steven Amsterdam is the award-winning author of Things We Didn't See Coming (winner of the AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR, shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction and longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award) and What The Family Needed (AWW Great Read and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC literary award).

He lives in Melbourne with his partner where he works as a palliative care nurse.

Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast. He co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and The New Yorker and contributes to Vanity Fair and The New York Times.

Carol Birch

Carol Birch is the author of ten previous novels, including Scapegallows (2008) and Turn Again Home (2003) which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

She has also won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the David Higham Award for Best First Novel.

Jamrach's Menagerie was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the London Book Award.

Stefan Merrill Block

Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book, The Story of Forgetting, was an international bestseller and the winner of Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature.

Stefan's stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR's Radiolab, GRANTA, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Stefan lives in Brooklyn.

Bryce Courtenay

Bryce Courtenay is the bestselling author of The Power of One, Tandia, April Fool's Day, The Potato Factory, Tommo & Hawk, Solomon's Song, Jessica, A Recipe for Dreaming, The Family Frying Pan, The Night Country, Smoky Joe's Cafe, Four Fires, Matthew Flinders' Cat, Brother Fish, Whitethorn, Sylvia, The Persimmon Tree, Fishing for Stars, The Story of Danny Dunn and Fortune Cookie.

The Power of One is also available in an edition for younger readers, and Jessica has been made into an award-winning television miniseries. Bryce Courtenay lives in Canberra.

Sophie Cunningham

Sophie Cunningham is the author of six books, her most recent being City of Trees, a former publisher and editor, was a co-founder of the Stella Prize and is now an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University's Non/fiction Lab. In 2019, Cunningham was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her contribution to literature.

Mark Dapin

Mark Dapin's most recent book of military history, The Nashos' War: Australian national servicemen and Vietnam, won the People's Choice Award at the Nib Waverley Library Awards, and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award for non-fiction.

His novel, Spirit House, about Jewish prisoners on the Burma Railway, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Nikki Gemmell

Nikki Gemmell is the bestselling author of seven novels and four works of non-fiction for adults, and two novels for children. Her work has received international critical acclaim and been translated into many languages.

In France she's been described as a female Jack Kerouac, in Australia as one of the most original and engaging authors of her generation and in the US as one of the few truly original voices to emerge in a long time.

Nikki is currently a columnist for the Weekend Australian's Saturday magazine, and a Friday regular on the Today programme in Australia. Born in Wollongong, Australia, Nikki lived in London for many years but has now returned to Australia with her family.

Steven Hall

Steven Hall's debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts, won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It was an international bestseller and has been translated into over thirty languages. Hall was also the lead writer on the bestselling video game Battlefield 1, which sold over 3 million copies in its first week of release. In 2013, Hall was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. 

Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is the author of six works of nonfiction and two novels.

He has covered the Tibetan question for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications for more than twenty years. He has been traveling in and around Tibetan communities and the Himalayas for more than thirty years.

Suzanne Joinson

Suzanne Joinson is an award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction whose work has appeared in, among other places, the New York Times, Vogue UK, Aeon, Lonely Planet collections of travel writing and the Independent on Sunday.

Her first novel, A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (2012) was translated into 16 languages and was a National Bestseller. She lives in Sussex.

Lloyd Jones

Lloyd Jones has written novels, short stories and a memoir.

He won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novel Mister Pip.

His other books include Hand Me Down World and A History of Silence. Lloyd lives in Wellington.

Stephen Kelman

Stephen Kelman was born in Luton in 1976. Pigeon English, his first novel, was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and he was also shortlisted for the New Writer of the Year Award at the 2011 Galaxy National Book Awards. Pigeon English is a set text on the GCSE syllabus. Stephen lives in St Albans

Marina Lewycka

Marina Lewycka's novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and short-listed for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Subsequent novels include Various Pets Alive and Dead; Two Caravans; We Are All Made of Glue and The Lubetkin Legacy.

Frances Mayes

In addition to her worldwide bestselling Tuscany memoirs Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany, and Every Day in Tuscany, Frances Mayes is the author of the travel memoir A Year in the World, illustrated books In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home (with Edward Mayes), The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (also with Edward Mayes), and her most recent memoir, Under Magnolia.

She has published a novel, Swan, set in the South; The Discovery of Poetry: A Guide for Readers and Writers; and five books of poetry. She divides her time between Tuscany and North Carolina.

Jan Morris

Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother, and when she is not travelling she lives with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her books include Coronation Everest, Venice, The Pax Britannica Trilogy (Heaven's Command, Pax Britannica, and Farewell the Trumpets), and Conundrum.

She is also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and, more recently, the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. A Writer's World, a collection of her travel writing and reportage from over five decades, was published in 2003.

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Chris Pavone

Chris Pavone grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Cornell, and was an editor at book-publishing houses in New York for fifteen years. His 2012 debut, The Expats, described by the Sunday Times as 'a captivating, sophisticated thriller' won both the Edgar and Anthony Awards for best first novel and was a Sunday Times bestseller.

It was followed in 2014 by the New York Times bestseller, The Accident and his his most recent novel, The Travelers, was The Sunday Times Thriller of the Month.

D. B. C. Pierre

When not travelling far and wide DBC Pierre divides his time between England and a mountainside in Ireland.

Vernon God Little, his debut novel, won the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award, and was followed by Ludmila's Broken English and Lights Out in Wonderland.

He is also the author of a collection of short fictions, Petit Mal, and a Hammer novella, Breakfast with the Borgias.

Arnold Zable

Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate. His works include Scraps of Heaven, Violin Lessons, The Fighter, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier's Literary Award and a New South Wales Premier's Literary Award and his most recent work The Watermill. Zable lives in Melbourne.

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