Travels With Myself

Travels With Myself is a dazzling collection of selected writings by bestselling travel writer and novelist, Tahir Shah. Written over twenty years, the pieces form an eclectic treasury of stories from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyond. Some consider the lives of women in society - both in East and West. The women-only police stations of Brazil, for instance, as well as the female inmates waiting to die on America's death row, or the young widows who clear landmines for a living in northern Cambodia. More still consider Morocco, where Shah and his family resided for many years in a mansion set squarely in the middle of a sprawling Casablanca shantytown. Yet more reflect on the oddities and contradictions of the modern world, such as why, in India each summer, hundreds of thousands line up to swallow live fish; or how the Model T Ford sounded the death knell of lavish Edwardian ostrich-feather hats. Regarded as a brilliantly original writer, Tahir Shah has gained a worldwide following by perceiving the lands through which he travels with a lens honed to detail. Questioning everything he observes, Shah taps down to a bedrock of wonder which most writers and travellers don't even realize exists.