Slightly Foxed – The Real Reader's Quarterly

Slightly Foxed enters into the Christmas spirit and publishes an intriguing stocking filler

Ghost Writer

An incredible but true story as told to Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Paperback • 148 x 105mm • 32pp • ISBN 978 09548268 8 8

UK price: £5 / Overseas: £6.50

Most readers of Slightly Foxed will be aware that books, as Milton put it, are not absolutely dead things. Few of us, however, realize quite how alive and talkative our libraries are. Ghost Writer is the voice of an insider, 800 years old but still going strong — an autobiography straight from the shelf. Speaking via its ghost-writer, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, the Arabic manuscript of Abd al-Latif’s Book of Useful Information and Admonition tells its own true, if admittedly incredible, story. Set in medieval Cairo and Aleppo, seventeenth-century Oxford and 1960s London, it is a tale of cannibalism, a curse, and of an authorial voice from beyond the grave. Beautifully produced with decorations by David Eccles, Ghost Writer is a perfect, stocking-sized Christmas entertainment. It not only redefines the meaning of a talking book; it may even make us listen to our libraries. Tim Mackintosh-Smith won the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award with his first book, Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land. His last two books, Travels with a Tangerine and The Hall of a Thousand Columns tracing the travels of Ibn Battutah, were both highly acclaimed. For the past twenty years he has lived in a tower-house in the Yemeni capital San’a.