“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”
For World Book Day I nominate the book that made me travel. The words were so powerful that made me live in the truth of its images, walk the paths of love, anger and anguish of the telltale hearts roaming a world without maps… And I felt the desert, dissipating in my veins, the blood throbbed of life and traveling sand.
“The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names… Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.”
– Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
