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Lonely Planet Better Than Fiction 1: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers

Lonely Planet Better Than Fiction 1: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers

By Alexander McCall Smith, Isabel Allende, Steven Amsterdam, Kurt Andersen, Carol Birch, Stefan Merrill Block, Tom Carson, Bryce Courtenay, Sophie Cunningham, Mark Dapin, Peter Ho Davies, Charles Finch, Nikki Gemmell, Don George, Steven Hall, Keri Hulme, M J Hyland, Pico Iyer, Suzanne Joinson, Lloyd Jones, Stephen Kelman, Marina Lewycka, Peter Matthiessen, Frances Mayes, Jan Morris, Joyce Carol Oates, Tea Obreht, Keija Parssinen, Chris Pavone, Dbc Pierre, Aliya Whitely, Joe Yogerst, and Arnold Zable

Join famous fiction writers and up-and-coming authors for this new collection of globetrotting real-life travel tales. By turns funny, poignant and thought-provoking, you'll be transported from Azerbaijan to Vietnam, via Iceland, India, Samoa, Scotland and beyond.

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Book Information

Publisher: Lonely Planet
Publish Date: 11/21/2017
Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781787012660
ISBN-10: 1787012662
Language: English

Full Description

"...a brilliant collection of travel stories...threaded with great warmth, as readers are invited to travel in the company of these famous authors and experience their passions and revelations." BOOKSELLER + PUBLISHER

We asked some of the world's most acclaimed fiction authors, including Isabel Allende, Peter Matthiessen, Alexander McCall Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, Tea Obreht and DBC Pierre, to describe their greatest non-fictional journeys. The 32 stories collected in Lonely Planet's Better than Fiction touch on everything from disorientation and revelation to disillusion and redemption.

However, these real-life tales all share one common characteristic: a passion for the precious gift that travel confers, from its unexpected but inevitably enriching lessons about other peoples and places, to the truths it reveals about ourselves. By turns funny, poignant and thought-provoking, you'll be transported from Azerbaijan to Vietnam, via Iceland, India, Samoa, Scotland, Antarctica, Alaska, Argentina, Nicaragua, Rome, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and beyond.

Edited by travel writer Don George.

Also available:
Lonely Planet Better than Fiction 2

About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world's number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we've printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You'll also find our content online, on mobile, video and in 14 languages, 12 international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more.

TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category

'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times

'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves, it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia)

About the Authors

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH is the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels and of a number of other series and stand-alone books. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have been bestsellers throughout the world.

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Isabel Allende won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then, she has authored twenty-six bestselling and critically acclaimed books, which have been translated into more than forty-two languages.

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Kurt Andersen is the bestselling author of Evil Geniuses , Fantasyland and the novels True Believers, Heyday and Turn of the Century, among other books.

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Peter Ho Davies is the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of The Fortunes and The Welsh Girl (long-listed for the Booker Prize). Chosen by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists, he is on the faculty of the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan.

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CHARLES FINCH is a book critic and essayist as well as the author of fifteen novels. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and the recipient of the 2017 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

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Nikki Gemmell is the international bestselling author of thirteen novels, including The Bride Stripped Bare , and four works of non-fiction, most recently her memoir of her mother's death, After.

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Don George wrote the book on travel writing, literally. His book, Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Writing , is the best-selling travel writing guide in the world.

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Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014) is the only writer to win the National Book Award for fiction and nonfiction. A cofounder of The Paris Review , he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of its William Dean Howells Award, among many other honors.

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Frances Mayes is the author of the classic Under the Tuscan Sun, which was a New York Times bestseller for more than two and a half years and became a movie starring Diane Lane.

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Jan Morris (1926-2020) lived and wrote as James Morris until 1972. She resided with her partner, Elizabeth Morris, in northwest Wales, between the mountains and the sea.

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Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

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With three decades as an editor, writer, and photographer under his belt, JOE YOGERST has lived and worked on four continents, including Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America.

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