Another cricket related birthday present, but this is a brilliant travel book, and the cricket is just a coat hanger to steer him (literally); what a poorly mixed metaphor.
Broom appears to be (and probably is) a pretty laddish lad who decides to cycle from London to Brisbane to catch the first 2010 Ashes test. The protracted narrative, crossing the Turkish mountains, down through Syria and the Sudan, through India from Mumbai via Hyderabad to Calcutta, and then from Darwin to Brisbane is just brilliant – the exhaustion, the people he meets, the history about which he has read up well, his own ambivalence about having companions for brief periods, it is all really well done and if I was 30 years younger I would be tempted to follow in his tyre tracks.
A really interesting book; one of the best this year.
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