Clara’s Verdict
The travel memoir is a genre that lives or dies by the quality of the company, and Sue Perkins is exceptionally good company. East of Croydon — her account of travelling the length of the Mekong River from Vietnam to Tibet, a journey for which she was thoroughly ill-equipped — is one of the funniest and most emotionally honest British travel books I have encountered in years of reviewing. Read by the author, which is really the only way a book like this should be consumed in audio, it is an unqualified pleasure across ten and a quarter hours.
Perkins is not a travel writer. That is precisely what makes this a wonderful travel book.
About the Audiobook
The premise is almost comedic in its setup: Perkins, who is frightened of flying, has no practical skills, cannot be more than three minutes from a supermarket, and has been managing crippling anxiety for seven years, is asked whether she would like to travel the entire Mekong River for a documentary. She says yes. The book that results from that decision is part travel writing, part anxiety memoir, part comedy, and part genuinely affecting reflection on what we are capable of when we have no choice but to manage.
The journey takes her through Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and eventually to the remote plateau of Tibet, and Perkins is perceptive about each place in ways that go beyond surface observation. She writes about poverty and development, about the people she meets along the route, with a care that is rare in celebrity travel books — she is genuinely interested in the places she visits rather than in how those places reflect upon her. The moments of physical comedy — the donkey incident that several reviewers single out — are balanced by passages of real tenderness, particularly around the communities she encounters living with the consequences of the Mekong’s changing ecology.
The anxiety runs like a thread through everything, and Perkins is admirably unsentimental about it. She does not resolve it. She manages it, and keeps going, which is perhaps the most honest thing any memoir about mental health can say.
The Narration
Perkins reads her own work, and the effect is everything you would hope for. Her comic timing is a professional comedian’s — perfectly calibrated, never overplayed — and her South London vowels give the whole enterprise exactly the character it needs. There is a vocal quality in her delivery of the more vulnerable passages that no narrator-for-hire could replicate: you feel the anxiety in the slight catch of her breath, the self-deprecating laugh that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. This is one of those author-read audiobooks that simply could not be improved upon by a professional reading.
What Readers Say
The 4.6 rating from 751 listeners reflects broad and consistent appreciation. UK responses have been warm: one reader who grew up in Croydon — as Perkins did — described an instant sense of recognition and wrote that the book had « laugh out loud moments » throughout. Another called Perkins « the female Michael Palin, » which is high praise in British travel writing terms and not entirely unearned. A measured review from someone familiar with her previous memoir Spectacles noted that this is « as humorous and heartfelt » as that book, with some particularly affecting moments alongside the comedy. The consensus is clear: this is a book that does things you don’t expect from its genre.
Who Should Listen?
If you are a fan of Sue Perkins — from Bake Off, from her comedy work with Mel Giedroyc, or from the Mekong documentary itself — this will give you a far more textured version of the journey than the television programme could contain. But even without that familiarity, this stands alone as an excellent memoir. It will appeal to anyone who enjoys travel writing that is honest about the costs of travel, comedy that comes from a place of real experience, and memoirs that take mental health seriously without wallowing in it. Strongly recommended.
Available to listen now on Audible UK.
