Theatre Of Fish: Travels through Newfoundland and Labrador

Description

An extraordinary journey across the magnificent, bizarre coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. John Gimlette's travels through this harsh and awesome landscape, the eastern extreme of the Americas, broadly mirrors that of Dr Eliot Curwen, his great-grandfather, who spent a summer there as a doctor in 1893, and who was witness to some of the most beautiful ice and cruelest poverty in the British Empire. Using Curwen's extraordinarily frank journal, John Gimlette revisits the places his great-grandfather encountered and along the way explores his own links with this brutal land.

John Gimlette is a well-established travel writer, having won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and the Wanderlust Travel Writing Award. He writes regularly for a number of broadsheets. His first book, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig- Travels through Paraguay, was published in 2003 to massive critical acclaim. When not probing the extreme corners of the Earth he practises as a barrister in London.

"'Terrific stuff... Hugely entertaining... As a descriptive writer, a master of the telling observation and the well-chosen epithet, [Gimlette] is in the highest class.'" -- Max Davidson Daily Telegraph "'An exhilarating [book], lit up by the vividness of the reporting, the sense of history it conveys, and the irresistible verve of Gimlette's prose. It told me a great deal I did not know and am glad to know, and entertained me greatly'" Sunday Telegraph "'John Gimlette is a writer of vivid comical prose... Mingles ancestral history and humorous anecdote... Highly entertaining'" Spectator "'A sprawling travelogue of fascinating anecdotes, flashes of brilliant wit'" Guardian "'With his quiet respectability shining throughout, Gimlette's tale is not just a travel yarn or a family history, it tells a story in its own right too'" Sunday Express