Imprint
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- W&N
Prose: non-fiction, Travel writing
Robert Twigger goes to the Far East in search of the world's longest snake - 'echoes of Gerald Durrell's trips crossed with Redmond O'Hanlon's foray into the heart of Borneo...a fantastic book' Daily Mail
About to be married, Robert Twigger decides on his last great adventure as a bachelor. Surfing the net, he discovers the Roosevelt Prize worth $50,000 for the capture of a live 30 foot python. Armed only with a tin of High Toast Snuff (deadly if sniffed by a snake), Twigger sets off into the remote jungles of Indonesia in search of his prey.
Along the way, he investigates the legendarily beautiful women of Sulawesi, treads in Nabokov's footsteps, looks for giant snakes beneath the sewers of Kuala Lumpur, and spends time with a variety of snake catchers and cults. After being caught up in anti-Chinese riots and surviving on greasy civet cat in the jungle, Twigger finally comes face to face with the big one; but the final capture is not quite what he had in mind.
Praise for Big Snake: Big Snake (HB)
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Twigger's adventures are vastly entertaining and he relates them as well as he seeks his zoological goal - Publishing News
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There are travelogue, natural history and mythology here, and the hunt is always entertaining and often hilarious. Twigger is a generous and easygoing observer and participant, even when the going gets rough. - Sunday Times
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Funny, immensely readable ... Twigger has found a narrative voice all too rare in contemporary travel writing: clear-eyed, unaffected, deadpan, slyly witty and unobtrusively erudite. By the end you cease to care whether or not he fulfils his mission... Merely to travel in his company is pleasure enough - Mail on Sunday - James Delingpole
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Part travelogue, part boy's own adventure story - The Mirror
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Echoes of Gerard Durrell's trips crossed with Redmond O'Hanlon's foray into the heart of Borneo... a fantastic book - Daily Mail - Georgia Metcalfe
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A yarn that manages to be ripping, thoughtful and at times very, very funny - Maxim
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A wonderfully enjoyable tale - Independent
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Moving and comic, both a poetic quest and a real adventure, Big Snake paints a hitherto unseen portrait of the Malay and Indonesian archipelagos and will leave you checking under your bed for your own hidden monster snake. A terrific read - Irish News
Robert Twigger
ROBERT TWIGGER has won the Newdigate Prize for poetry, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award and the Somerset Maugham Award. His twelve books have been translated into over twenty languages and cover both fiction and non-fiction, memoir and travel. He spent a year training with the Tokyo riot police, crossed Canada in a homemade birchbark canoe and was the first person to traverse entirely on foot the Egyptian Great Sand Sea. His quarterly comic of memoir and travel, This Simple Life, is available at roberttwigger.com
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