The Road to Oxiana

‘What Ulysses is to the novel between the wars and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book.’ Paul Fussell, Abroad

Discover the ultimate in classic 1930s travel writing.

‘A writer of breathtaking prose – prose whose sensuous, chiselled beauty has cast its spell on English travel writing ever since’ William Dalrymple

In 1933, the delightfully eccentric, Robert Byron set out on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Tehran to Oxiana – the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya which formed part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. His journey ended in what is now Peshawar, Pakistan. While his arrival at his destination, the legendary tower of Qabus, is a wonder, the journey itself is a captivating, quirky record of his adventures and a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now lost to time and conflict.

‘Funny, didactic and biting, Byron’s masterpiece transports us across the world and, better still, across the decades’ Independent

Author Biography

Robert Byron was born in England in 1905 into a family distantly related to Lord Byron. He attended Eton and Merton College, Oxford, and wrote several other travel books before his untimely death in 1941 when his ship to West Africa was torpedoed while serving as a correspondent for a London newspaper during World War II. Among his other books are The Station (1928), The Byzantine Achievement (1929), and First Russia, Then Tibet (1933).