His novels include The Bad Angel Brothers, The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari.

Dark Star Safari In his first new travel book in eight years, the endearingly irascible Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry and train. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Theroux's] witty observations and obvious love and curiosity for Africa should help make this entertaining epic a yardstick for future travel writing. Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. And his story is told by someone who leaves behind the comfortable limo or air conditioned bus and instead travels as the local poor people do.A Kenyan soldier trapped with Theroux in a highway robbery, offers him these words of comfort: "They do not want your life, bwana," he says, "they want your shoes. In the walled city of Harar, a Maltese nun cooks him a gourmet meal and beguiles him with tales of the lover she left for God. It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure. In his other books (which I also enjoyed - don't get me wrong), there is only so much he can describe about the train itself, and the method of travel. His encounters with the natives, aid workers and occasional tourists make for rollicking entertainment, even as they offer a sobering look at the social and political chaos in which much of Africa finds itself.

Readers grew tired of Theroux partly because he was always such a shatteringly miserable travelling companion. It is a journey of discovery and of rediscovery — of the unknown and the unexpected, but also of people and places he knew as a young and optimistic teacher forty years before.

The decrepitude here and elsewhere leads Theroux to observe (borrowing from Auden via Achebe): "That's what happened in Africa: things fell apart". Found this article which, while reviewing The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari, might as well have been reviewing this book.