Cities in Perspective

A guidebook is not always the only, or best, introduction to a destination. Sometimes, all you need is a little perspective to bring the place alive. Bloomsbury’s The Writer in the City is a reissued series of bestselling travel classics by well-known authors. But we’re not complaining, repackaged as the books are as posh hardbacks with deckled edges and in a travel-friendly size. Each hardback offers a well-known writer’s take on a city they know well, either rooted in their history with the city or due to a passionate engagement with it. John Banville writes in Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City, “This is not a guidebook, nor was it meant to be. As to what it is, that is harder to say. A handful of recollections, variations on a theme. An effort to conjure a place by a mingled effort of memory and imagination.” The first four books are now available in India: 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account by Peter Carey, Florence, A Delicate Case by David Leavitt, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris by Edmund White and Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City by John Banville.