That’s Where I Wanted to Go

‘The undisputed master of the Latin American scene’ Norman Lewis, Daily Telegraph

‘I cannot think of any other foreign writer who has entered into the labyrinth of the politics of my country and acquitted himself so well’ Mario Vargas Llosa

‘Nicholas Shakespeare is one of those writers who can do anything’ Peter Craven, The Australian

‘An encompassing talent’ Thomas Keneally

That’s Where I Wanted to Go is a collection in the footsteps of Bruce Chatwin’s posthumous collection What Am I Doing Here, Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities and, most recently, Norman Lewis’s A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis.

First-hand bulletins from the front lines of five continents, That’s Where I Wanted to Go not only records the last tremors of Empire but also a pre-internet world before the fall of the Iron Curtain. They range from Tasmania to Tierra del Fuego, from the Cold War cafés of Vienna and Prague to an opera house up the Amazon, from a tribe in the Atlas Mountains where women choose their husbands to the Falkland Islands on the eve of their invasion. They include a decades-long hunt for the leader of the Shining Path revolutionary movement in Peru and a poignant return to the killing fields of Cambodia, where the author spent part of his childhood.

Taken together, these pieces form a riveting and unusual memoir of a writer praised by the Wall Street Journal as ‘one of the best English novelists of his time’.