With Chatwin

Few writers have had as many distinct lives as Bruce Chatwin and few have been as compelling in person as in print. Few writers have had as many distinct lives as Bruce Chatwin and few have been as compelling in person as in print. Chatwin was a traveller, an aesthete and an anthropologist. In his twenties he was a star at Sotheby's; in his thirties he was a star at The Sunday Times. A solitary man and a socialite; he was always exotic. He became famous as the person who reinvented travel-writing and when he died in 1989, aged 48, he had published six strikingly varied books. Susannah Clapp's book is not a biography, but collects her own memories of Chatwin and those of his friends, acquaintances and colleagues, with the aim of producing a chronology of the author's life and, more important, of illuminating particular fields of interest. This is not merely a celebratory volume, but a investigatory one, illustrated with photographs of and by Bruce Chatwin.