Synopses & Reviews
"A lyrical homage to India's holiest, moodiest, foulest river. . . .Trojanow is the perfect mix of insider and outsider. . . . It is a treasure of a book, a must-have for anyone spending time on the Ganges and wanting to get to know her better."Financial Times
"Funny, shocking, and always interesting."The Spectator
Along the Ganges was voted one of the greatest travel books of all time by Condé Nast Traveler by a jury including Gore Vidal and Paul Theroux.
The River Ganges has a thousand names, and Hindu priests thought it a sin to call her a river at all. She is a goddess, the source of the world. Her waters are holy, healing, and still sold to Hindus the world over. Ilija Tojanow, an international best-selling author, traveled along the Ganges from the source, where it breaks free from the ice in the Himalayas, to the great cities. Along the way he visited the great Hindu festivals and talked to those who warn of ecological disaster caused by gigantic dams. This colorful travelogue describes a country caught between ancient traditions and astonishing modernity, and the holy river that crosses it for hundreds of miles.
Ilija Trojanow is the author Mumbai to Mecca (Haus Publishing) and the best-selling novel The Collector of Worlds, for which he was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
Synopsis
Voted one of the world's greatest travel books, now in a trade paper edition for the first time.
Synopsis
Ilija Trojanow travelled along the Ganges, from the source, where it breaks free from the eternal ice in the Himalayas, to the great cities, by boat, by bus, on overcrowded trains. He visited the great Hindu festivals and talked to those who warn of ecological disasters resulting from gigantic dams.
About the Author
Trojanow was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1965. In 1971 his family fled Bulgaria through Yugoslavia and Italy to Germany, where they received political asylum.
In 1999 Trojanow moved to Mumbai and became intensely involved with Indian life and culture. He has lived in Cape Town, returned to Germany (Mainz), and then to Austria, where he currently resides in Vienna.
In the 1990s Trojanow wrote several non-fiction and travel books about Africa, published an anthology of contemporary African literature and translated African authors into German. His first novel, "Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall", appeared in 1996. In it he recounts his family's experiences as political refugees and asylum seekers. After that appeared the science fiction novel "Autopol", created on the Internet as a "novel in progress," "Hundezeiten", a travel account of a visit to his Bulgarian homeland, and books dealing with his experiences in India. His reportage "Zu den heiligen Quellen des Islam" describes a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Since 2002 Ilija Trojanow has been member of the PEN centre of the Federal Republic of Germany. Among other awards he received the Bertelsmann Literature Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann competition in Klagenfurt in 1995, the Marburg Literature Prize in 1996, the Thomas Valentin Prize in 1997, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 2000 and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the category of fiction for his novel "Der Weltensammler" published in the UK and US by Faber and Faber as "The Collector of Worlds".