Courland is an entity that no longer exists. With the Gulf of Riga to the north, the Baltic to the west & Lithuania at its southern border, & now part of modern Latvia, the region was by occupied by Nazi Germany & returned to Soviet Russia after the war, remaining largely inaccessible until 1991. Once ruled by descendants of the Teutonic Knights, it is now a nowhere land of wide skies & forests, deserted beaches, ruined castles & ex-KGB prisons. For years Jean-Paul Kauffmann has been irresistibly drawn to this place, the buffer between the Germanic & Slav worlds. His digressive travels at the wheel of a Skoda become an investigation into the whereabouts of a former lover, a search for an excavator of tombs, & he follows in the footsteps of Louis XVIII, for whom Courland was once a place of exile. Author of Voyage to Desolation Island & The Dark Room at Longwood
- 'a remarkable book which defies classification' (New Statesman), which won six prizes on its publication in France
- Kauffmann has come to be known as an erudite & witty observer of the world's most desolate reaches.