You might describe this as a "low-key" travel book - except that on a scale of one to 10, hitch-hiking all the way from the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, is pretty far removed from, say, such well-known low-key activities as drinking tea while watching soap operas on telly. Vikram Seth completed his epic journey while he was a student at Nanjing University in the early 1980s. The trip began as an organised tour for foreign students - tired of being organised, Seth conceived the notion of returning to India for his summer holidays via Tibet and sought out the company of truck drivers, some kindly, some irascible, all prepared to share cab space with a complete stranger, and a foreigner at that. The tone of the book is resolutely unheroic and free of the jokiness which seems to be de rigueur in travel writing. Any view of Tibet is fascinating, and Seth's is a novelist's eye, and a sharply observant one at that.
