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Tragic Shores: A Memoir of Dark Travel

Hardcover / ISBN-13: 9781849163262

Price: £20

ON SALE: 6th April 2017

Genre: Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure / Travel & Holiday / Travel Writing

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‘I have come to thank dark places for the light they bring to life.’

Thomas Cook has always been drawn to dark places, for the powerful emotions they evoke and for what we can learn from them. These lessons are often unexpected and sometimes profoundly intimate, but they are never straightforward.


With his wife and daughter, Cook travels across the globe in search of darkness – from Lourdes to Ghana, from San Francisco to Verdun, from the monumental, mechanised horror of Auschwitz to the intimate personal grief of a shrine to dead infants in Kamukura, Japan. Along the way he reflects on what these sites may teach us, not only about human history, but about our own personal histories.

During the course of a lifetime of traveling to some of earth’s most tragic shores, from the leper colony on Molokai to ground zero at Hiroshima, he finds not darkness alone, but a light that can illuminate the darkness within each of us. Written in vivid prose, this is at once a personal memoir of exploration (both external and internal), and a strangely heartening look at the radiance that may be found at the very heart of darkness.

‘A fascinating, troubling memoir from a fine writer’ Mick Herron

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Reviews

One of the best at what he does
Publishers Weekly
One of our greatest chroniclers of the human heart
Goodreads
Cook's style is very quiet, reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro in its subtlety and understatedness
Historical Novel Society
Every Thomas H Cook novel is a subtle mind game ... positively haunting
New York Times
Cook remains one of the most accomplished writers in the crime/thriller genre
Financial Times
A suspense writer working at the top of his form
LA Times
A beautifully written and poignant memoir that will make you want to pack your bags and visit
Crime Review
Tragic Shores is, in a way, not tragic at all. It is a love story, and a hymn to our ability to go on, in the face of the ultimate darkness
Times Literary Supplement
Sometimes it takes writing of great power to provide the insight into what it means to be human, as well our place on this planet. Thomas H Cook's Tragic Shores is one such work
Ali Karim, Shots magazine
Evocative and emotional
Writing Magazine
Cook writes with a tender precision . . . a stunning and revelatory book that will haunt you for months to come
Catholic Herald
Cook can achieve a palpable, vivid sense of place, often in a few sentences, sometimes in a few words, while smoothly integrating the factual background data into his narrative
Bookbag
Cook writes movingly, perceptively, fulfilling his assertion that "there is much to be gained where much has been lost"
Irish Times
A fascinating, troubling memoir from a fine writer
Mick Herron, Geographical Magazine