In Xanadu

One of the most successful, influential and acclaimed travel books of recent years from the author of ‘Return of a King’, which has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize.

At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge’s Xanadu itself.
At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic of its kind.

Reviews

‘Brilliant’
Spectator

‘Glorious’
Patrick Leigh Fermor

‘Dalrymple is probably the best travel writer of his generation’
Daily Mail

‘The future of travel writing lies in the hands of gifted authors like Dalrymple’
Sara Wheeler, Independent

About the author

In Xanadu won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and the Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award, and was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Dalrymple’s second book, City of Djinns, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. His third, From the Holy Mountain, was published in April 1997, and won the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Award and the Thomas Cook Award. His latest book, The Age of Kali, was published in 1998.