The happy ant-heap and other pieces - Norman Lewis

'Norman Lewis is ninety. He has been travelling since he was a young man and now collects his recent travel writing into this delightful volume, full of aphrodisiacs made from seals' penises and "vulture lung soup". Lewis is the classic "I-am-a-camera" travel writer. He sees, but he does not judge. This is the perfect book to go travelling with this summer: off-beat, uninhibited and wise' Robert McCrum, Observer

'The essays span the continents, from Europe to Africa to Asia to South America to Oceania; they have in common an enviable descriptive power, a touch of the bizarre and a great deal of style. . . There is a brilliantly frightening piece on the Mafia and its total control over everyday life in Sicily. . . Such is Lewis's breadth of experience that, writing about aphrodisiacs in Liberia, he can mention a trip he once made to the Yemen, where he became acquainted with the men who dive for oysters, an encounter with Hemingway in Havana, where Ernesto was desperately trying to reverse increasing impotence, and then a return to Italy, where a Neapolitan once introduced Lewis to the local sovereign remedy: a tin of Spam' Geoffrey Moorhouse, Daily Telegraph

'He is one of the two or three greatest living travel writers, with a prose style of unmatched wit and subtlety, full of images as startling as a Verey light. . . Despite the bleakness of most of his subject matter, Lewis is such a fine and amusing writer - and also such an intensely moral and humane one - that he can make even the most horrible situations both bearable and instructive... . at ninety his literary voice is completely of the moment' William Dalrymple, Sunday Times

Norman Lewis was born in London. The author of thirteen novels and fourteen works of non-fiction, he died in 2003.