Ronald Reagan was preparing an invasion that was going to rescue the whole island next week. Fidel was about to be airlifted out to a new home in Miami, the guest of his secret patrons and supporters, the U.S. government. The soldiers were already lining up for Bay of Pigs II and a new constitution […]

Michael Ondaatje’s novels are all about putting the pieces together. Quite literally, because they proceed through a series of exquisited shaped vignettes that the reader has to fit into a pattern in her head; but more deeply, too, because their structure invariably reflects their theme. Nearly always they are about attempting to suture things together, […]

Howard Norman’s novels are nearly all about hemmed-in, stifled people in the vast, silent spaces of the far north, whose quiet lives are thrown about by acts–or moments–of sudden violence. His characters are mostly shy eccentrics, engaged in occupations not so different from the private, controlling business of the novelist: in previous novels, they have […]

What I love about Kyoto is the night. Almost every visitor to the ancient Japanese capital, home of geisha and tea-ceremonies and kimono and 2000 temples–is shocked by the first view, as she steps out of Kyoto’s ultra-modern train station, with an eleven-storey department-store and a luxury hotel attached: the “City of Heavenly Peace,” the […]

I once drove one hour out of central Los Angeles, along the infamous 10 freeway, clogged with long-distance trucks and low-riding gang-mobiles as it moves into and through the dark industrial areas of East Los Angeles towards the desert, and turned off the barreling eight lanes at a small road in a college town. Following […]

The air, sultry, pulsing, hot even along the pitch-black streets, is redolent of Cuba. The two-storey gingerbread white houses, their leafy verandahs looking out on swampy gardens, hammocks swaying under Gothic extravagances, make you think you are in Haiti. On one car on sleepy Fleming Street, defiant outlaw legends painted all over it, one of […]

At night, every night, electrical storms broke across the bay, the mangrove trees in front of my little motel shaking in the wind, the clouds above the ocean lit up every few seconds by long, silent blasts of Turner-esque light, as if the heavens were receiving an X-ray. When I stepped out of my little […]

Suddenly, rising above the clumps of tea bushes that smother the rolling hills of central Sri Lanka–slight female Tamil workers moving up and down the slopes with baskets on their backs–a great forested outcropping appears. You pass a long flight of steps along the main road, leading up to a Hindu temple. A sign for […]

This is what an English country town might look like, you think, after it had been emptied out by a nuclear disaster, and airlifted down upon a dry and semi-tropical Californian landscape. The buildings are one or two storeys high, no more, and the eentre of town runs out almost before you get there; the […]

The night in Bangkok is like nowhere else. The smell of mint, of jasmine and perfume as I step outside the airport a little before midnight. Stalls still lining the streets, fragrant with lemongrass and tangerines. Long-legged ladies stepping over streets turned into rivers by the night’s downpour, as dainty as duchesses about to be […]