First edition. ‘Bruce Chatwin’s personal selection of his own stories, profiles, and travelogues. It reflects a lifetime’s fascination for the beautiful and the bizarre, for the strange backwaters of history and the even stranger stories people tell. He goes in search of the Yeti in Nepal, and follows in the footsteps of his mentor Robert Byron in Afghanistan. We meet him as a young man working for Sotheby’s, as an intellectual dreamer reliving a sketch by Turgenev on the banks of the Volga, and as the keen-eyed reporter researching the authenticity of a wolf-boy’ (dustwrapper blurb). The volume was edited by Chatwin in the last year of his life (the preface – which begins ‘Like any layabout, I wanted to write’ – is dated 1988), and it was published in 1989, shortly after his death on 18 January 1989.