In 1986 Charles Nicholl went to Thailand, intending to take a ‘spiritual rest-cure’ in a Buddhist forest temple. But the way there had many surprising side turnings. A chance meeting on the night train north takes him on a circuitous journey in the company of Harry, a French gem-trader with a chequered past, and his mercurial Thai girlfriend, Katai. For the travel writer, he learns, it’s not what you go looking for that counts, but what you find. They drift along the banks of the Mekong, up into the Golden Triangle and into the rebel strongholds of northern Burma. Opium dreams and jade windows, spirit-callers and moon-hares: Nicholl’s crisp, vivid prose captures every detail of this elusive adventure, as we travel with him across borderlines both real and imaginary.

In 1880 a taciturn young Frenchman arrives at the Yemeni port of Aden, where he finds work as a foreman in a coffee warehouse. He is the poet and enfant terrible Arthur Rimbaud, author of A Season in Hell – a notorious figure in France but now, at the age of twenty five, determined to start a new life. In this atmospheric study of Rimbaud’s ‘lost years’, Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of his life as a trader, explorer and gun-runner in East Africa. We follow his trail in Somalia and Djibouti, in the highlands of Ethiopia, in the souks of Cairo: a man on the run from his past, living out his famous teenage pronouncement, ‘Je est un autre’ – I is somebody else.