All the Time in the World - Softcover

Williams, Hugo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571294812 ISBN 13: 9780571294817

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2012

Synopsis

'I believe I shall be writing home about this trip for the rest of my life... years from now, still recollecting, like an old white hunter, shadowy images to an empty fireplace, far into the night...'

All the Time in the World, a first work of prose by the poet Hugo Williams, was originally published in 1966 and commemorates Williams' effort at age 21 to 'travel the world': the Middle East, India, South-East Asia, Japan and Australia. Rich with striking and vivid perceptions of people and places and perilous forms of transport, the account also finds Williams acquiring precious life-experience, even as the setting moves from the self-evident 'poem' of India's landscape to barren, petrified Northern Australia. In Calcutta Williams looks up the great Satyajit Ray through the telephone book. In Thailand he meets a girl at a dance-hall, moves into her sunny flat, contemplates staying. But to England he will return, albeit by the most unexpectedly arduous leg of his amazing journey.

About this title

From the Publisher:

A personable account of a two-year wander around the world in the early 1960s, when the author was in his early twenties and not long out of Eton. All the qualities I have come to admire in Williams’s later writing are here — his sophisticated innocence, his charming sense of the absurd, the casual intensity of his poet’s eye. It is this last which makes the book a mosaic of brilliant glimpses, whether Williams is riding across the deserts of the Middle East, idling for weeks on a houseboat in Kashmir, or dealing with the “evil eye” on a mail packet in the Pacĩc. A jaunty, thoroughly winning traveler’s tale.

About the Author:

Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, since when he has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy's Rain won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published by Faber in 2002 and his last collection, Dear Room, was published in 2006. He writes a freelance column for the TLS and lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0571294812
• ISBN 13: 9780571294817
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280