Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer
Available as eBook, Paperback
Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Jeff Atman, a journalist, is in Venice to cover the opening of the Venice Art Biennale. He’s expecting to see a load of art, go to a lot of parties and drink too many bellinis. He’s not expecting to meet the spellbinding Laura, who will completely transform his few days in the city.
Another city, another assignment: this time on the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi. Amid the crowds, ghats and chaos of India’s holiest Hindu city a different kind of transformation lies in wait.
A beautifully told story of erotic love and spiritual yearning, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is playful, stylish, sensual, comic, ingenious and utterly captivating. It confirms Geoff Dyer as one of Britain’s most exciting and original writers.
“Dazzling and peculiar … A prodigious display of virtuosity.”
Jan Morris
guardian
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“Engaging and funny … Dyer is a witty and concise observer of landscapes: social, geographical and emotional … [his] eccentric charm and barbed perceptiveness will hook you to the end.”
Tim Teeman
the Times
“Delivered with laconic wit and an evocative sense of place, Dyer’s effortlessly readable prose is shot through with psychological insight, truth and an eye for travelogue detail.”
Alan Chadwick
metro
“Dyer is more than a cult writer; he’s a virus, invading your system. You look at things differently, embracing the idiosyncratic, keeping the obvious at bay … vintage Dyer, painfully funny, slyly observant, brilliant, full of wild misery.”
Lee Langley
spectator
“Dyer is a smart, witty writer…, extraordinarily reflective, perceptive and funny…as well as a fine prose stylist. He’s a keen commentator on the ironies of contemporary life from the very first page.”
Lionel Shiver
financial Times
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ’s Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.