Maps of My Life

by Guy Browning (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $3.45

  Guy Browning, author of the No 1 bestselling Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade and popular longstanding Guardian columnist, finally turns his unique attention to a rich new comic seam - his own deeply eccentric and far-flung upbringing. Weaned on maps, educated by maps, surrounded by maps and ever so slightly in love with maps, Guy Browning presents a selection of intriguing and quirkily annotated cartographic gems to chart his unsteady progress from pewling toddler to pewling young man via the furthest corners of the Alps, Niagara Falls, the Mediterranean, Central America and darkest Chipping Norton. Maps of My Life revisits the richly comic highways, byways and unpaved tracks of Guy's unusually peripatetic early years, peopled with unforgettable relatives, friends and foe such as the Fatted Calf, the Sainted One, Langton Machoko and Marshal LaPoulette...Beautifully produced with full-colour maps throughout, Maps of My Life is one of the funniest autobiographical travel memoirs since Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent .

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.45

  Guy Browning was weaned on, educated by and to this day remains utterly in love with maps, so it's only right that the story of his life should also be the story of his favourite maps. In this little comic masterpiece, a series of quirky cartographic gems chart his unsteady progress from birthplace Chipping Norton, 'the golden navel of the universe', through his starting position as second son - 'Second children are like second marriages: you know that in general they're worth having but you've also learned from your first how messy and unpleasant they can be' - and then round the world via the Alps, the American West and the heat and dust of El Salvador - 'It is to that fine country I owe my abiding love for all things Hispanic and my deep dislike for porridge'.