Author(s): Geoff Dyer

Travel Writing | Staff Favourites

From one of Britain's most original writers, White Sands is a creative exploration of why we travel. Episodic, wide-ranging, funny and smart, the linked journeys recall the themes of Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It - - albeit with the wisdom of (middle) age. From a trip to the Lightning Field in New Mexico to chasing Gauguin's ghost in French Polynesia, from falling for someone who may or may not be a tour guide in Beijing's Forbidden City to tracking down the house of an intellectual hero in Los Angeles, Dyer pursues all permutations of the peak experience - - including the trough experience. In his trademark style he blends travel writing, essay, criticism and fiction with a smart and cantankerous wit that is unmatched. This is a book for armchair travellers and procrastinating philosophers everywhere.

Taking in a scattered series of quests for human immortality and elusive natural wonders, this thoughtful and erudite author explores how we inhabit space and time. Geoff Dyer draws broadly from the physical and philosophical meanderings of a peripatetic life to write of ‘experiences’ in places such as; New Mexico’s White Sands monument and Lightning Field installation, Egypt’s famous mausoleums, Beijing’s Forbidden City, Gauguin’s Tahiti, and the Watts Towers of Los Angeles.  While those who love Bruce Chatwin in Patagonia will be inexorably attracted to these essays, Dyer is very much of this millennium and the style and journeys he makes are uniquely his own.  The mesmeric lightness of his writing is made all the more interesting by the author’s refusal to be contained within the boundaries of memoir, treatise or travelogue. Mixing acute observation with wit, philosophy, literary references and popular culture, he reflects on how we employ linkages with the past, with people and with places to locate ourselves in the world. The author speaks of a ‘life so interesting’ he’d ‘like to stick around forever.’  He helps make it so for us. -> Mark