Book description
The course of the Meander is so famously indirect that the river's
name has come to signify digression - an invitation Jeremy Seal is
duty-bound to accept while travelling the length of it in a one-man
canoe. At every twist and turn of his journey, from the Meander's
source in the uplands of Central Turkey to its mouth on the Aegean
Sea, Seal illuminates his account with a wealth of cultural,
historical and personal asides.
It is a journey that takes him from Turkey's steppe interior - the
stamping ground of such illustrious adventurers as Xerxes, Alexander
the Great and the Crusader Kings - to the great port city of Miletus,
home of the earliest Western philosophers. Along the way Seal unpicks
the history of this remarkable region, but he also encounters a rich
assortment of contemporary characters who reveal a rural Turkey on the
cusp of change. Above all, this is the story of a river that first
brought the cultures of East and West into contact - and conflict -
with one another, its banks littered with the spoil of empires, the
marks of war, and the detritus of recent industrialisation.
At once epic, intimate and insightful, Meander is a brilliant
evocation of a land between two worlds.
Jeremy Seal is a travel writer, teacher and broadcaster with a
life-long fascination for Turkey. His first book,
A Fez of the Heart
, was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. He is also the
author of
The Snakebite Survivors' Club
,
The Wreck at Sharpnose Point
, and
Santa: A Life
, which was Radio 4's Book of the Week. He has written for the
Sunday Telegraph
,
Sunday Times
,
Conde Nast Traveller
, the
Weekend Australian
and the
New York Times
, among others. He lives in Bath.
