Travels With My Aunt

One of Graham Greene`s most loved novels, Travels With My Aunt is the story of Henry Pulling, an unmarried retired bank manager who has just been made redundant and, with no prospects or hobbies other than tending his dahlias, finds himself agreeably excited by his mother`s funeral. It is at this sad event that for the first time in more than half a century, he meets his formidable and irrepressible Aunt Augusta, and from this point on, his life is never to be the same again. An initial mix-up involving an illegal stash of marijuana and his mother`s ashes sets the tone for things to come, and abandoning Southwood and his dahlias, Henry goes on to travel through Brighton, Paris, Istanbul and then Paraguay. With his Aunt in tow - or, rather, in the tow of his aunt - Henry joins
the shiftless, twilight society of hippies, war criminals, smugglers and CIA men and gradually comes to realize that ”Beyond Latimer Road there stretched another world - the world of Wordsworth and Curran and Monsieur Dambreuse and Colonel Hakim and the mysterious Mr Visconti” and that this world is more his country than England, proving in the process than one may come to life at any stage during the course of a lifetime. Full of both bittersweet moments (as Henry comes to feel differently about his old life and origins) and hilarious ones, as he embarks on the new, the novel contains an array of vividly drawn characters - the formidable Aunt Augusta herself being one of the most unforgettable of Greene`s huge oeuvre - who will thrill, move and have you laughing out loud in
turns. A romp of a read.