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Books

Sri Lanka: emerald paradise with a dark interior

John Gimlett’s travel memoir Elephant Complex celebrates the enigmatic island of palm-fringed beaches and suicide bombs

29 October 2015

9:00 AM

29 October 2015

9:00 AM

Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka John Gimlette

Quercus, pp.517, £25, ISBN: 9781782067962

For a genre that is frequently dismissed as dead, travel writing is proving a remarkably stubborn survivor. If anything, this year’s Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award, won by Horatio Clare with Down to the Sea in Ships, a very British tale of the container-shipping trade, demonstrated how the genre remains in remarkably good health, shrugging off its perennial obituaries with great élan.

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