However, something was off -- my mood or the tone of the writing, but whatever it was, I didn't mesh with this memoir as I had wanted. He tossed the things on to Mam’s bunk, found the tiny oil-lamp on the back girder, and lit it and watched the flame grow. He even found some wooden seed markers, and wrote the rabbits’ names on them, and stuck them in for tombstones. The language is beautiful, drawing the reader in with vivid descriptions that appeal to all the senses. During his travels by train, he mourns the closings and threatened closings of all the small branch lines that reached so deep into the countryside and coast.

Being his usual miserable persona, Theroux doesn't spare the locations he visits and the people he meets just because they happen to be British. The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain, originally published in 1983, [4] is the account of a three-month-long journey taken by novelist Paul Theroux around the United Kingdom in the summer of 1982.but then I got less and less sympathy for the boy because of some of his actions (both involve hitting someone/thing with sticks) and by the end I wasn't as moved by his story as I expected. I wanted to like this book because I know my mum really loved it, but I just could not get into it at all.

This new novel by the author of Blitzcat and Ghost Abbey evinces a crackling pace that will keep pulses racing. As the quotes below reveal, Paul Theroux has a gift for the beautiful turn-of-phrase and is occasionally insightful.all over the world and written about it in an excellent series of travel books, he had never actually explored or written about the British Isles outside London. Sadly, I chose badly as this is a book where I kept on wondering why he bothered to complete what seemed to be even for him a thankless and depressing endeavour. English people of a certain class often said things like this, taking a satisfaction in the certainty of death, because dying was a way of avoiding the indignity of what they imagined to be a grim future. We still have those cars with old people in them, parked at the very edge of the sea, and the people in them, even on mild days, just looking at the sea, sometimes on camping chairs but still within touching distance of their ugly, smelly metal box.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in my country only drunks, or lunatics, or social misfits ever talk to strangers. I hope that if he repeated his journey today he would find that things had changed since the 1980s and cycling would be considered viable. The Falklands war, The Troubles, birth of Prince William, capture of The Yorkshire Ripper, railway strikes etc. I would have given this one three stars but for the ending, which kind of defeated the rest of the book for me.Overall, another enjoyable read from Theroux and I look forward to the next of his on my list to read! Everyone seemed to be going to China that year, or else writing rude things about the Arabs, or being frank about Africa. There was high unemployment as the country was in transition from industry, manufacturing and mining to a more service-oriented country.

Published not many years after Theroux found success with his wonderful Great Railway Bazaar, he wrote this, traveling the perimeter of his adopted (at the time) home of Great Britain.For a book which I understand was written for children and young adults, there are some surprisingly adult themes. While I found it interesting to hear what the locals were saying about the military developments, it also made me uneasy and reminded me of current wars and strife and the fearmongering going on right now.