Better than Fiction: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers (ed by Don George, Lonely Planet)

18 August 2012 Unlocked content from the archive. Books+Publishing

Better than Fiction is a brilliant collection of travel stories, written especially for Lonely Planet, which spans the globe in the tradition of the publisher’s previous anthologies such as Unpacked: Travel Disaster Stories. The list of Australian and international contributing authors is impressive. Among the highlights, Arnold Zable offers a glimpse of China emerging from the Cultural Revolution; M J Hyland writes about her encounters with thieves in Rome; Nikki Gemmell is changed by love and loss in Antarctica; and Marina Lewycka finds a travellers’ oasis in Malawi. In other wonderful stories, Alexander McCall Smith meets Freudian psychoanalysts in Buenos Aires; Joyce Carol Oates writes of an unnerving visit to San Quentin prison in California; Steven Hall tells an odd but beautiful tale of a shark; and Bryce Courtenay bemoans government restrictions on travellers at airports. Also in separate stories, Steven Amsterdam and Sophie Cunningham refer to the psychoactive side-effects of the same anti-malarial drug. The collection is threaded with great warmth, as readers are invited to travel in the company of these famous authors and experience their passions and revelations; it also shows that nonfiction can indeed be as good as, if not better than, fiction.

Andrew Wrathall is the publishing assistant for Bookseller+Publisher

Category: Reviews