His epic commute finally comes to a halt in a desolate land of cracked hills and thorn bushes that reaches toward Antarctica.Īlong the way, Theroux demonstrates how train travel can reveal “'the social miseries and scenic splendors” of a continent.

Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, Paul Theroux takes a grand railway adventure first across the United States and then south through Mexico, Central America, and across the Andes until he winds up on the meandering Old Patagonian Express steam engine.

If you enjoyed The Old Patagonian Express, you might like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.The acclaimed travel writer journeys by train across the Americas from Boston to Patagonia in this international bestselling travel memoir. Theroux is the father of British documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux, and the uncle of American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux. Theroux has published numerous works of fiction, some of which have been adapted into films, including The Mosquito Coast (1981), a 1986 film directed by Peter Weir and starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. Among his best known works of travel-writing are The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), The Old Patagonian Express (1979), and Riding the Iron Rooster (1985). 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, born in Medford, Massachusetts. Witty, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a richly evocative account of travelling to 'the end of the line'. Shivering and sweating by turns as the temperature and altitude rise and plummet, he describes the people he encountered - thrown in with the tedious, and unavoidable, Mr Thornberry in Limón and reading to the legendary blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires.

Beginning on Boston's subway, he depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip, via pretty Central American towns and the ancient Incan city of Macchu Pichu. The Old Patagonian Expresstells of Paul Theroux's train journey down the length of North and South America. Setting off in his hometown, and ending up 'almost at the end of the world', Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express is a travel writing tour de force from one of the masters of the genre contains a new preface by the author in Penguin Modern Classics.

The old patagonian express