Product Details
The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain
By Paul Theroux

List Price: $14.95
Price: $11.21 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

51 new or used available from $1.13

Average customer review:

Product Description

After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scotland, the people he encountered along the way revealed far more of themselves than they perhaps intended to display to a stranger. Theroux captured their rich and varied conversational commentary with caustic wit and penetrating insight.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #496801 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-06-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 368 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Paul Theroux’s highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Customer Reviews

An affectionate look at a changing landscape5
Paul Theroux's travel book soften being out strong opinions in readers- particulrly those who have visited a place he has written about. Many of the most critical seem to focus on a few details and miss the overall tenor of the piece.

As Theroux makes quite clear in this book, he loves the English seacoast, and he met many warm people along the way. At the same time, he unflinchingly relates every detail of his experience, every rude comment, every unpleasant encounter. As he notes, most travel writing is boring; we went to Egypt, we saw the pyramids, et cetera. What makes for interesting reading is the minutia, the detail that makes my trip different from your trip. My England is nothing like Theroux's, but then, I wasn't there for 17 years, I didn't tour the coast, and I am not Paul Theroux.

I recently re-read "Kingdom", while thinking about a bicycle tracing some of the ground covered by Theroux, and what struck me was how much there was that Theroux truely liked about his trip, the things he saw, and the people he met. The more unpleasant encounters only served to make the pleasant ones more so.

"Kingdom By The Sea" is for me, at least, a thouroughly enjoyable tour, a look into the British and into Theroux, and as always, a terrific piece of writing by one of the modern masters.

Fine writer gets trapped in bad plan1
Theroux's interesting but illstarred plan was to meet the English by travelling around the coast, on foot and by train. Real English, real conversations. He was twenty years too late. About a month into this disaster it's becoming obvious that even the lower middle class have abandoned the gray, chilly English coastal towns for cheap jumbo jets to sunny climes. The old resorts have become God's Waiting Room and battlegrounds for the skinhead urban poor. Chapters go by without him seeing a child, or a real family, only potty old people who hate foreigners. These aren't "the English." Poor Theroux. Read his fine book on China instead.

vintage theroux5
This is a terrific book. The author is simply sharing HIS observations of life along the British coastal cities and towns. It's a great read! Even if it's not all peaches and cream, it's what he felt, and you can't help but feel like a traveling companion.