Paul Theroux Audiobooks

Cairo to Cape Town overland in Dark Star Safari, by a master of modern travel writing

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

1 listener rating

Who is Paul Theroux?

Paul Theroux, born in 1941, is an American novelist and travel writer, and by common consent one of the defining figures of modern travel literature. His breakthrough was The Great Railway Bazaar in 1975, the train journey that set the template for decades of travel writing that followed, and he has published prolifically ever since, moving between fiction and travelogue with unusual ease.

The fiction has more than held its own: The Mosquito Coast won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981 and was adapted twice, as a film in 1986 and a television series in 2021. Writing also runs in the family – he is the father of the authors and documentary makers Marcel and Louis Theroux, brother of the writers Alexander and Peter Theroux, and uncle of the actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.

Paul Theroux in audiobooks

Theroux in audio is the ideal travelling companion: observant, opinionated and never bland. Dark Star Safari, his title in our catalogue, delivers the qualities that made his name – a long journey rendered in sharp prose, with the author’s unsentimental eye trained on everything and everyone he meets, himself included.

For UK listeners, travel writing of this calibre does something few genres manage: it turns a commute or a kitchen into somewhere else entirely. Theroux is no cosy narrator of pretty places – he is candid, sometimes prickly, always interesting – and that honesty is exactly what makes the hours in his company worthwhile.