LATEST SALES & OFFERS: PROMOTIONS

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

A Single Swallow

Following the Migration from South Africa to South Wales

Horatio Clare

$24.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
Vintage
03 May 2010
A magical, thrilling journey and a hugely seductive book which combines the best travel and nature writing.

From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, across two continents and fourteen countries - this epic journey is nothing to swallows, they do it twice a year. But for Horatio Clare, writer and birdwatcher, it is the expedition of a lifetime.

Along the way he discovers old empires and modern tribes, a witch-doctor's recipe for stewed swallow, explains how to travel without money or a passport, and describes a terrifying incident involving three Spanish soldiers and a tiny orange dog. By trains, motorbikes, canoes, one camel and three ships, Clare follows the swallows from reed beds in South Africa, where millions roost in February, to a barn in Wales, where a pair nest in May.
By:  
Imprint:   Vintage
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 131mm,  Spine: 20mm
Weight:   233g
ISBN:   9780099526315
ISBN 10:   009952631X
Pages:   336
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Horatio Clare is the author of Running for the Hills (nominated for the Guardian First Book Award 2006 and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award), Sicily through Writers' Eyes and Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope. The journey for this book was partly financed by a Somerset Maugham Award. He has made radio features in Morocco, written about Ethiopia for the New Statesman, and been commissioned by CondeNast Traveller to write on Sicily and Namibia. He has worked as a producer for BBC Radio's 'Night Waves' and 'The Verb'.

Reviews for A Single Swallow: Following the Migration from South Africa to South Wales

Clare's extraordinary and mesmerising odyssey following the migration of the swallow from South Africa to South Wales -- Annabel Goldie * Herald * A gifted and lyrical travel writer * Financial Times * The author deploys some fine lyrical writing and a gift for inventive, unexpected metaphor ... Clare's other great asset is his brave, modern, multicultural and open-hearted approach to travel itself -- Mark Cocker * Guardian * Fizzingly entertaining. His own prose has something of their flight: daring, sharp-edged, fast-moving, graceful, full of surprises. This is a great adventure, thrillingly realised -- Tom Fort * Literary Review * Remarkably insightful and entertaining, with Clare proving himself to be the most enthusiastic, open-minded, intelligent and incorrigibly romantic of travellers * Mail on Sunday * Clare has produced an enthusiastic, often elegiac, chronicle of his encounters with the swallows -- Brian Schofield * The Sunday Times * His eye for detail and his elegant pen give flavour of each country he crosses: great veldt and high plateaux, Congo's ""green vastness"", the ""sandy seas"" of the Sahel and, finally, the fertile plain of the north African coast * The Economist * The resulting book, travel writing at its very best, is enthralling, passionate, hair-raising, quirky, hilarious, informative, occasionally mad and utterly, utterly brilliant... irresistible stuff. -- Val Hennessy * Daily Mail * Horatio Clare pays tribute to the extraordinary migratory journeys of the swallow...a book that combines travel with natural history * Metro * It's graphically done, making me feel I was with him all the way * The Sunday Telegraph, Seven Magazine *


See Also