“What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.”

American novelist and travel writer

Paul Theroux is an American novelist and travel writer. He is known for books that move between fiction and travel writing, including the travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar. His work has reached beyond the page as well. The Mosquito Coast won the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and some of his fiction has been adapted for film and television, including versions of The Mosquito Coast.