Personal Landscapes

Clair Wills on Ireland’s missing persons

Clair Wills was in her twenties when she learned she had a cousin she'd never met.

It wasn’t as though their families drifted apart. She’d never been told of this person’s existence. It was shrouded in shame and secrecy, and she wanted to understand why. Her memoir Missing Persons may change how you think about your own family, and your family secrets.

We spoke about Ireland’s mother and baby homes, the stigma of illegitimacy, and how secrecy can shape a family and a society.

 

Deborah Lawrenson on her mother the spy

What would you do if someone you knew your entire life — your mother — suddenly revealed that she’d been a spy? Deborah Lawrenson turned her story into a novel. 

The tangled web of espionage she weaves in The Secretary is fiction, but the background to the story is authentic, drawn in part from a seemingly innocent diary her mother wrote in 1958 while working at the British Embassy in Moscow. It’s an exciting high stakes thriller with insightful social commentary and a vivid sense of place. Exactly the sort of novel she excels at.

We spoke about Cold War Moscow, growing up as an embassy child, and the shock of discovering her mother’s cloak-and-dagger past.

 

Michael Asher on crossing the Sahara by camel

In 1986, Michael Asher and his wife Mariantonietta Peru set out to cross the Sahara from west to east, by camel and on foot. Their 4,500 mile (7,200 km) journey is the longest trek ever made by Westerners in the Sahara, and the first recorded crossing from west to east by non-mechanical means. 

I read Asher’s book about this trip — Impossible Journey — more than twenty years ago, and it’s been in my travel literature top ten ever since.

We spoke about traveling by camel, Saharan cultures, and what it was like to see the Nile after nine desert months.

Charles Nicholl on Rimbaud’s lost Africa years

Arthur Rimbaud turned French poetry on its head in his late teens. His work influenced everyone from the modernists and the Beats to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, but he wasn’t recognized or well-liked in his lifetime. He guzzled absinthe, sponged money off friends, and wrecked the life of fellow poet Paul Verlaine. And then he renounced poetry at age 20 and simply walked away. 

The last we hear of him, he’s somewhere in Africa living as a trader and gunrunner — and for a while, that was all we knew. The book we’re talking about today reveals what happened next.

Charles Nicholl is the author of Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1890-91.  He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a recipient of the Hawthornden prize and has won the James Tait Black prize for biography. 

We spoke about the allure of Rimbaud the poet, his ‘lost years’ in Africa, and his late reputation as a traveler and Arabist.

Paul Theroux on life’s vanishing points

The stories in The Vanishing Point, Paul Theroux's new collection, span the globe from Hawaii and the South Seas to Africa and New England. They have all the qualities I love in his fiction: a sharp bite of satire that skewers pretension, crisp dialogue, and an eye for the small, clear detail — an action, a pattern of speech, an element of dress — that reveals someone’s deepest character. He describes the things we all see but don’t mention in polite conversation, and he shines a light on thoughts we actively avoid.

Paul is the author of some 33 works of fiction including The Mosquito Coast and The Bad Angel Brothers, and 19 travel books including The Great Railway Bazaar and Dark Star Safari, books that cemented his standing as our greatest living travel writer.

We had a wide-ranging conversation about the core themes in these stories, including aging, childhood reading, and how taking risks can make you wise.

Pamela Petro on the Welsh presence of absence

Pamela Petro is an American writer obsessed with a country she visited by chance. She first went to Wales as a graduate student in her early twenties. The place felt deeply familiar from the moment she arrived, as did the sense of longing that permeates its landscape and stories, both recent and ancient.

The Welsh have a word for this acute presence of absence, an untranslatable term that captures the feeling of something left behind or taken away, irretrievable beyond place and time, but that forever saddens, motivates and marks us. It’s a feeling that resonates deeply with me, and I think you’ll recognize it, too.

We spoke about her obsession with Wales, the presence of absence, and how the sense of loss and longing drives creativity and invention.

Katja Hoyer on daily life in East Germany

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Eighties movies portrayed East Germany as a vast open-air prison populated by monotonous grey blurs without individuality or agency, but the GDR was not a static land that time forgot.

Katja Hoyer's brilliant book Beyond The Wall tells its story through the lives of ordinary people. She also grapples with the ongoing tension between a Germany that sees the GDR as an aberration, and the desire of East Germans to hold on to their memories of a life they lived in colour.

We spoke about daily life in East Germany, why the Berlin Wall reduced political tensions, and why tinned soup became a modern political controversy.

 

Julian Evans on Odesa and Ukraine

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Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa, Ukraine on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994. He fell in love with its distinct personality as a self-contained world. He also fell in love with a local woman, and for nearly thirty years, her city became his city, too. 

His new book, Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War, weaves memoir with history and literature to give us a haunting portrait of a country struggling against terrible odds to survive. 

We spoke about the city of Odesa, his visits to front line combat zones, and what Russia’s war means for Europe.

Jeffrey Meyers on charting parallel lives

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A great biography reveals the raw humanity behind lives of rare genius. In his latest book, Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, Jeffrey Meyers draws on Plutarch’s principle of dual composition to shed fresh light on some of the figures who did so much to shape our world.

It’s full of literary feuds, illicit romance, chronic alcoholism and sympathetic attachments between writers, artists, actors, directors, and thinkers —names you’ll recognize, and ‘greats’ you thought you understood.

We spoke about Plutarch’s use of mirror images, literary feuds as spectator sport, and Audrey Hepburn’s connection to Anne Frank.

Cam Honan on the hiking life

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Cam Honan has hiked across 56 countries on six continents, logging over 96,500 km in three decades. Backpacker Magazine called him “the most traveled hiker on earth”.

I’ve wanted to speak with him for ages about his excellent website The Hiking Life. He's also the author of Wanderlust Nordics, Wanderlust Himalaya, Wanderlust Mediterranean, Wanderlust USA, The Hidden Tracks, and other books.

We talked about his favourite Nordic trails, how to go light by ditching your tent and sleeping bag, and why you should see the world at walking speed.