Norman Lewis - Golden Earth. Travels in Burma (epub)

Norman Lewis describes a land of breath-taking natural beauty peopled by the gentle Burmese. This is a country where Buddhist beliefs spare even the rats, where the Director of Prisons quotes Chaucer and where three-day theatrical shows are staged to celebrate a monk taking orders.

Hitching lifts with the army and with travelling merchants, Lewis is treated with hospitality wherever he stops in this war-torn land, and reveals a country where ‘the condition of the soul replaces that of the stock markets as a topic for polite conversation’.

‘A truly great travel writer, perhaps the greatest we have.’ - Sunday Telegraph
‘... the best ever written about Burma.’ - New York Review of Books