Borderlines

Charles Nicholl has written history, biography and travel but brings all these disciplines together as a literary detective. Subjects have included Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Rimbaud and Leonardo da Vinci. His most recent book is The Lodger, an intimate study of Shakespeare s life in London in the first years of the 17th century. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a recipient of the Hawthornden prize and has won the James Tait Black prize for biography and the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger award. He has also presented documentary programmes on television and has lectured in Britain, Italy and the United States. He lives in Lucchesia in Italy with his wife and children and is a visiting Professor at Sussex University.

A South-East Asian travelogue that s as vivid and exotic as a fever dream Nicholl is a grand guide, good-humoured, inquisitive, and caring, illuminating but never overshadowing the marvellous land he so superbly describes. Kirkus Reviews