Aatish Taseer

The Quiet American

Undercover Muslim: A Journey into Yemen

By

The Bodley Head 293pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

‘Curiosity’, Conrad tells us in Lord Jim, ‘is the most obvious of sentiments.’ And if it was curiosity, restlessness, a dislike of George W Bush, or even boredom with his job as an English teacher in a Vermont prison that made Theo Padnos drop what he was doing and set out for Yemen, he should just tell us as much.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    • Hi , we would love to review 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' in our next issue! Please could you get in… ,
    Follow Us