Passage to Page: The Fiction and Fact of Writing Place 

The greatest living writer of encounters with people in their places (aka 'travel writing'), Colin Thubron is also one of the language's great prose stylists. Always learning the languages of the territories he visits, he has transformed the reach of that genre while also mapping interior human landscapes in novels of great subtlety and insight. Both strands come together in his ninth novel, Passage, set in an Egypt both ancient and modern, and tracking the implications of a mesmerising love triangle alongside profound reflections on the nature of the brain, selfhood, grief, betrayal and the final passage we all must take, from this world to what might follow.