The road to Oxiana

Byron Robert

Published by PAN Books

THE ROAD TO OXIANA by ROBERT BYRON
with an Introduction by BRUCE CHATWIN


'What Ulysses is to the novel between the wars and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book'
PAUL FUSSELL

In 1933-4 Robert Byron went to Persia and Afghanistan. The result was The Road to Oxiana, a wonderful record of his journeys, full of vivid reporting, exact observation of people and places, and very funny dialogue.

`Extremely diverting...rich, though sometimes acidulous, entertainment'
THE TIMES

`He was an improviser of genius, a natural player-by-ear. Into Oxiana went scholarly essays, aphorisms, farcical playlets, wonderfully exact notations of moments of time caught and frozen in the particularity of place, along with documents like visa forms and newspaper cuttings...It is a brilliantly-wrought expression of a thoroughly modern sensibility, a portrait of an accidental man adrift between frontiers'
JONATHAN RABAN/NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

`Anyone who reads around the travel books of the thirties must, in the end, conclude that The Road to Oxiana is the masterpiece'
BRUCE CHATWIN