Grains Of Sand - Softcover

Buckley, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099277352 ISBN 13: 9780099277354

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

Driven by a desire to explore the most remote, barren yet romantic places on earth, Martin Buckley set off on a two-year journey through the world's deserts. In the Sahara he was threatened with murder. In the Gobi, he hijacked a cycle-rickshaw. Dehydrating in the Sonora, he hallucinated fruit cocktails. Encountering the desert at its most extreme, he learned how to find water - and how to spit tobacco into a camel's nostril.Images of the desert exert a powerful grip on the human imagination, from Lawrence of Arabia to Star Wars. Deserts feel familiar, yet mysterious. The truth is that they are even stranger than we imagine.GRAINS OF SAND is a passionate, profound and frequently funny evocation of the world's deserts and the people who live in them; an extraordinary global adventure, and a personal voyage of discovery.

About this title

From the Publisher:

'Buckley is a born storyteller...read this book' Observer
‘Buckley writes wonderfully well, with a novelist’s ear for dialogue and a con man’s eye for character. The book’s opening scene, set at a tawdry French diplomatic party in Chad, is every bit as accomplished as anything in Graham Greene. Buckley’s desert descriptions resonate long after you put his book down. No grain of sand goes unturned in Buckley’s engaging, almost surgical observations of people and place. He’s as sharp as a cactus spine’ Evening Standard

‘I was sitting in the bath one day, poring over a soggy map, when it hit me: binding this green planet were bands of gold. I saw that you could almost circumnavigate the earth without ever leaving the desert.’ Martin Buckley’s account of a journey through some of the world’s harshest landscapes is harsh, hilarious, yet filled with a sense of the desert’s culture, ecology – and ultimate mystery.

‘Magnificent...His account of a two-year odyssey round the world’s deserts...is brilliantly illuminated...passionate and entertaining’ Scotland on Sunday

‘As with all good travel books, the outer journey is paralleled by that into unknown realms within...Buckley is a born storyteller. He is a powerfully visual writer. Read this book most of all for its prose, which sparkles with inventiveness, its unstinting compassion for the people and places it describes and its author’s anarchic humour. It is the next best thing to crossing the deserts of the world oneself’ Observer

‘There is a zest and maturity to the prose which marks Grains of Sand as a particularly auspicious debut...Buckley has Theroux’s gift for observation’ Herald (Scotland)

‘The further Buckley ventures off the beaten track the better he writes...An epic journey’ Sunday Telegraph

From the Back Cover:

'Buckley writes wonderfully well, with a novelist's ear for dialogue and a conman's eye for character. The book's opening scene, set at a tawdry French diplomatic party in Chad, is every bit as accomplished as anything in Graham Greene. Buckley's desert descriptions resonate long after you put his book down. No grain of sand goes unturned in Buckley's engaging, almost surgical observations of people and place. He's as sharp as a cactus spine' EVENING STANDARD

'I was sitting in the bath one day, poring over a soggy map, when it hit me: binding this green planet were bands of gold. I saw that you could almost circumnavigate the earth without ever leaving the desert.' Martin Buckley's account of a journey through some of the world's harshest landscapes is harsh, hilarious, yet filled with a sense of the desert's culture, ecology - and ultimate mystery.

'Magnificent...His account of a two-year odyssey round the world's deserts...is brilliantly illuminated...passionate and entertaining' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

'As with all good travel books, the outer journey is paralleled by that into inknown realms within...Buckley is a born storyteller. He is a powerfully visual writer. Read this book most of all for its prose, which sparkles with inventiveness, its unstinting compassion for the people and places it describes and its author's anarchic humour. It is the next best thing to crossing the deserts of the world oneself' OBSERVER

'There is a zest and maturity to the prose which marks Grains of Sand as a particularly auspicious debut...Buckley has Theroux's gift for observation' HERALD (SCOTLAND)

'The further Buckley ventures off the beaten track the better he writes...An epic journey' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

View the picture gallery at www.randomhouse.co.uk/grainsofsand/

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0099277352
• ISBN 13: 9780099277354
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464