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Hav

Jan Morris

3.89 · Rating details · 406 ratings · 79 reviews

A brilliant and touching piece of imagination, conjuring a city of impossible possibilities, much like the writings of Calvino and Borges, where pleasures and life are truly possible.

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Hardcover, 288 pages

Published June 1st 2006 by Faber & Faber (first published January 1st 2006)

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· 406 ratings · 79 reviews

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Mar 16, 2017 Tony rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nyrb-classics, welsh, top-10-2017

There are two works here: Last Letters from Hav, first published in 1985, followed by Hav of the Myrmidons, a sequel published twenty years later. I will speak of them separately.

LAST LETTERS FROM HAV:

They say that Hav is not real, that there is no city, no country named Hav. True, travel agents have been asked and ingloriously failed to get folks there. And the author's descriptions and such maps as she provides are, well, wanting. It is close by Montenegro, we know that for sure, but we can't ...more

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Sep 02, 2015 Trish rated it it was amazing

Shelves: mysteries, fiction, literature, mideast, adventure, asia, spies-and-such, animals, something-completely-new, classics

Morris, most everyone knows, is one of the premier travel writers of the 20th Century. She went everywhere, and wrote with such interest and erudition about the places she visited that one reads her works simply because she writes better than anyone else. One publisher gave her the opportunity to write fiction, and Morris created an invented place, Hav, to which many folks immediately wanted to book a flight.

This novel is composed of two parts: in Last Letters from Hav Morris describes for us ...more

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Apr 15, 2014 Alexandra rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, read-in-2014, female-author-2014, read-in-2020, female-nb-gq-2020

I have never, in my life, read a book two times in a row. Until I read Hav. This was possible because Hav is not a novel in the ordinary sense. It's a travel memoir to a fictional place that could easily exist; it's a meditation on East meeting West, on history and culture and modernity; it's about being a stranger in somewhere simultaneously familiar and alien. And it has some of the most wonderful prose I've come across.

This section from Hav illuminates many of the aspects that make the book ...more

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Oct 23, 2017 Mir added it

Shelves: travel

This was somewhat interesting, but I'm not sure the of the point of it. I always feel with projects of this sort that I am wasting my time reading something informative in tone but non-factual in content. Essentially, why read a cultural study or travelogue about a made-up place when there are plenty of real ones about which I could be better informed. I am dropping this unfinished and will try something else by the author at some later date.

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Sep 13, 2011 Ben Taylor rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reviewed

(Originally published at www.bookslut.com)

William Gibson writes of "a prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors... It turns there, on the mind's horizon, exerting its own peculiar gravity... It is a literary singularity." This city seems to exist outside of time, yet moves within it. One can never be sure.

Gibson was writing about the fictional city of Bellona from Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, yet his words apply equally -- if not ...more

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Mar 15, 2020 Jim rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: travel, fiction, britain, women-writers

This is actually two separate books: Last Letters from Hav and its sequel Hav of the Myrmidons. In them Jan Morris writes about an imaginary peninsula ajacent to Turkey that has a mixed population of Arabs, Greeks, Russians, Chinese, troglodytes (the "Kretevs"), and miscellaneous Europeans. Readers of Hav have been so befuddled as to make travel inquiries.

A brilliant travel writer like Jan Morris can easily confuse the reader. Her picture of the old Hav is so appealing and the picture of the ...more

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Apr 28, 2020 Paul Dembina rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An excellent example of that small sub-genre the invented place set in our own world.
Other examples I've read have tended to feel like a mish mash of existing places. This is different. Jan Morris really makes you feel like Hav is real and furthermore worth making the effort to visit (at least in its original form)

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Dec 15, 2011 Jon Anzalone rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A book that I feel was written, essentially, for me. Not in the sense of an upheaval-ing personal revelation, but one that deals with my adoration of esoterica of ongoing multicultural melting of people and ideas both modern and ancient. I think the first sequence of the story, Last Letters from Hav, is the more successful piece of writing. The second, Hav of the Myrmidons, is fascinating but feels a little less lovingly thought over. In any case, it's an extremely fascinating study of the ...more

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Aug 15, 2011 Nicholas During rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Jan Morris can really write. There is not much action in this book, and it is often hard to keep the characters in check, especially over the span of two separate books, but the level of writing is so high that none of that matters.

Moreover, I really enjoyed the allegorical implications of the book. First, as a node of mittle-Mondial (I made that up) mid-20th century history and culture: Russian aristocrats waxing nostlagic, English colonialism quietly ending, religions bubbling together while ...more

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Apr 18, 2011 Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides rated it liked it

Shelves: travel-narratives, imaginary-country

I read once that Michael Chabon received many letters from people claiming to have been to Sitka, the imaginary Jewish-Alaskan setting of his much-acclaimed The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Apparently the same thing happened to Jan Morris, the creator of the mysterious port city of Hav. Supposedly a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society asked her to point it out on a map. I'm not surprised; the first portion of this book especially is strongly reminiscent of Janet Flanner's dispatches from ...more

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Jan 10, 2012 Scott rated it liked it

Jan Morris is an odd writer. Her prose is a strange combination of observant and precious, sharp and gushing, sometimes in the same paragraph. At times I think she's a mediocre writer with flashes of brilliance, and at other times, a superb writer afflicted by tone-deaf lapses of style. But I keep picking her up.

Last Letters from Hav, the first and longest section, is definitely better than the second. That novella is a love letter to travel and the messy, grubby exuberance of history; the ...more

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Dec 10, 2011 Barbara rated it really liked it

Shelves: nyrb

Hav is a story about globalization: What are the competing historical, cultural, political, and religious factors that all weave together to make up the fabric of an international city? And can anyone ever really get a firm grip on such a city's essence? There isn't much plot to the novel - it reads as a travel memoir, and there are only two characters worth mentioning - the author, our guide to Hav on two separate occasions, and Hav itself: an enigmatic, elusive, and somewhat shady character ...more

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Dec 11, 2011 John rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, novels

A great, simple idea, executed well. A piece of travel writing about a place that doesn't exist, but is (mostly) completely plausible. Morris inserts Hav into history quite seamlessly, describing its fate through the Crusades, the Ottoman conquests, Russian rule, and the World Wars. She ends up with a place where a great many historical currents came together, resulting in a strange mix of influences in politics and culture (for instance, the Hav-Venetian school of painting). Then, in the ...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Lyn Elliott rated it liked it

Shelves: travel, fiction

I would rather read Morris on real places than imaginary ones. I know lots of people have enjoyed this, but I found it contrived and, therefore,not as funny as the author no doubt intended.

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Aug 18, 2015 James rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, modern-and-contemporary-literature, sci-fi, fiction, british-literature, travel

Jan Morris is known for writing travel guides but perhaps her most famous one is a guide to a place that never really existed, that never existed outside of the mind of the reader and the author - Hav. This city state in the eastern Mediterranean has a long and varied history, with every great power interested, an eclectic society of Chinese, Arabic, British, Russian, and French influences.

Jan Morris' prose is sublimely beautiful, conjuring up such a realistic image of this place, it almost ...more

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Aug 10, 2017 Nigel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction

A travel writer arrives at a tiny, once thriving Levantine city-state on the shores of the Mediterranean. She meets the people, sees the sights, evokes past and present through delicate description and historical anecdote, not always reliable, but even the stories are indicative of some aspect of the personality of the place. It is rich with culture and full of history, and yet it is an odd, elusive place, all surface, all smiles, hard to pin down, hard to truly understand. She will never ...more

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Jan 08, 2012 Jeremy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A fascinating book that is actually two novellas. The first, "Last Letters from Hav" is essentially a travelogue through an intriguing obscure (and imaginary) middle eastern city of Hav. Set in the mid-80s, it draws and intricate portrait of the city, its people and customs. The novella feels more like a travelogue than a work of fiction. The story, such as it is, ends up raising a bunch of questions that mostly go unanswered. In the last scene, the author flees as a crisis descends upon the ...more

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Jan 03, 2019 Tom rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: utopia, science-fiction

Hav is a fictional trading city located somewhere in the Mediterranean. Its old. It has been around for centuries, if not millennia. Its rumored to be on the site of ancient Greek Troy. It is ostensibly European, but has been conquered by Arabs, Turks, Russians, Venetians, British, and others. Each administration has left an indelible stamp on the city through buildings, urban planning, and population resulting in a labyrinthine conurbation with many distinct parts. Its also a trading port. Its ...more

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Jun 19, 2015 Daniel rated it it was ok

Hav, a compilation of Jan Morris' books Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons, is a strange beast. It reads like a travel memoir, but tell the tale of the author's visit to Hav, a fictional city-state adjoining Turkey. It's quite elegantly done: Jan Morris weaves her city into the history of the Mediterranean world, and into the lives of a variety of real-world historical figures who visited at one point or another. I'm not generally a fan of travel literature, so it was tough going at ...more

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Dec 30, 2013 Charlie Byers rated it liked it

Maybe the oddest book I read, this year. The novel is a meta-document without being meta-fiction, exactly (maybe it's a rare example of fiction that would make better non-fiction, if it were only factual,) and the author's own afterword seems to say "I'm not sure what this is about, either; Have fun." At times it was hard to tell if this book was over my head or just wandering, and given the slow pace of the beginning, I wished some of the twists had paid off in more satisfying ways. But I have ...more

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Aug 27, 2017 Sean rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, fiction, recommended

Hav by Jan Morris is a brilliant, imaginative travel-fiction cum allegory about culture and change in the modern world. Morris, already a renowned historian and travel writer, creates the fictional city of Hav on the Eastern Mediterranean. This edition from the NY Review of Books consists of two novels: Last Letters from Hav (1985) and Hav of the Myrmidons (2005) that take place in Hav, a fictional city-state somewhere in the Mediterranean. The city is a polyglot mix of cultures, languages and “Hav” by Jan Morris is a brilliant, imaginative travel-fiction cum allegory about culture and change in the modern world. Morris, already a renowned historian and travel writer, creates the fictional city of Hav on the Eastern Mediterranean. This edition from the NY Review of Books consists of two novels: “Last Letters from Hav” (1985) and “Hav of the Myrmidons” (2005) that take place in Hav, a fictional city-state somewhere in the Mediterranean. The city is a polyglot mix of cultures, languages and sensibilities.

The first novel is more of a conventional travel narrative detailing Morris’ six months stay in Hav. Hav is a strange mixture of many influences, from Arabic, Greek, French, Italian, German, Russian. It even has a large Chinese community that came in the 1500s. The Crusaders were there and it is rumored that it is the last bastion of the Cathars. It may have been founded by the Greeks descended from Achilles or it may have been founded by ancient Celtic peoples who had wandered their way down to the Mediterranean. Hav is everywhere but nowhere. Unique yet instantly recognizable as a Levantine city with all its complexes and colors. Morris has a great eye for detail and puts these elements together into a combustible mix with much life but with something dark waiting in the shadows. One of the fun aspects of the first novel is that Morris sprinkles her narratives with quotes from famous visitors to Hav such as Marco Polo, Sigmund Freud, T.E. Laurence, etc… She describes the unique features of Hav society such as the Armenian who has played a trumpet voluntary on the ramparts of the crusader castle every morning, the dangerous but exciting Roof Race, the rare Snow Raspberries brought down by the Kretevs—the hill peoples—in the Spring, the incongruous Chinese pagoda on the coast, among many others, the large dog statue at the mouth of the harbor covered in graffiti of all the people who have come over the centuries. The first novel ends abruptly as Hav is invaded by foreign warships and the author flees over the mountains.

The second novel changes tone and Hav – now called the Myrmidonic Republic of Hav – has changed beyond recognition. After the “Intervention,” a Cathar theocracy takes control and Hav has now become a wealthy place. As Old Hav is an allegory of a twentieth century world, Myrmidonic Hav is a biting allegory of the twenty-first century world. Most of the old world is gone and what is left or been allowed to be preserved is commercialized. The Roof-Race is a now a sanitized global sports events hoping to get into the Olympics. The Chinese Pagoda has burnt to the ground but its ruins have been allowed by the new powers to remain as a reminder of the Old Hav. Snow Raspberries have now been genetically modified and produced in large quantities to be shipped all over the world. The graffiti on the dog statue has been removed. The trumpeter was killed during the Intervention but his memory has been preserved in a museum and the music has been preserved in a mechanical carillon given to Hav by the Chinese. At the center of the Republic is a large glad tower with a giant glowing ‘M’ with no discernible purpose.

The ancient symbol of Hav was a maze. And both Old and New Hav are mazes of different sorts. If the earlier Hav is a confusion of cultures and tones, the new Hav is a sanitized but opaque world where confusions are hidden behind attempts to create narrative. The most profound lesson for me came during the authors return to the Greek island of San Spyridon in the second novel. The Greeks here, far from being down-trodden like they were in the first novel, are buoyant and proud of their heritage. The new powers in Hav have crafted a new history of the city that emphasizes its Greek heritage. The New Hav has taken the various strands that informed the Old Hav and refashioned them into a simple, linear narrative that tries to reconcile irreconcilable parts of Hav’s identity and discarding the one’s that do not work. The Greeks are happy because they are now central to the simplified story. Their lives now have coherence but that coherence is a false creation of the present.

As you might be able to tell, I enjoyed this work greatly. I highly recommend it for its imagination, its beautiful details, and its trenchant allegorical rendering of the modern world. It is quite unlike anything you will read and I promise it will make you think long after you finish it. ...more

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Aug 10, 2017 Mike Cahoon rated it liked it

Hav is exceptionally well-written. Jan Morris is confident and direct in her language, maybe craftsman-like. I associate this sort of pithy, urbane, witty style with so many great British writers and I think Morris falls right in with that tradition - not to say that Hav is a traditional novel. Hav is unlike any novel Ive read.

Hav examines the history, people, culture, society and just general impression of a fictional Mediterranean city-state located somewhere in Southern Turkey. Though Hav is exceptionally well-written. Jan Morris is confident and direct in her language, maybe craftsman-like. I associate this sort of pithy, urbane, witty style with so many great British writers and I think Morris falls right in with that tradition - not to say that Hav is a traditional novel. Hav is unlike any novel I’ve read.

Hav examines the history, people, culture, society and just general impression of a fictional Mediterranean city-state located somewhere in Southern Turkey. Though fictional, Hav and Havians inhabit our earth, share our global history, and interact with real historical figures. I guess you could say it’s in Earth’s cinematic universe. A knowledge of history sophisticated enough to convincingly re-imagine it and the creative depth to make so lifelike a fiction is what compels the reader. If cornerstone narrative elements like plot and character development are must-haves for you, then you might find Hav to be painfully dull.

And even though I enjoyed the book I did not find it exciting. I don’t really see how one could. Reading it was more contemplative and almost meditative for me. I liked going to Hav, it’s a fascinating city and the reading experience felt like walking around and meeting some of the locals.

My deeper thoughts on the book came from comparing its two parts: Last Letters from Hav, which was written by Morris in 1985; and Hav of the Myrmidons written in 2005. Hav of the Mrymidons takes place after a mysterious conflict called The Intervention which fundamentally changes Hav. 1985’s jumbled colonial port transforms into Dubai-flavored commercial enterprise. Even though reviews of Hav of the Myrmidons are more lukewarm that Last Letter’s, I think that they make the whole work much richer. It makes more poignant the theme that Hav is at the mercy of global influences beyond its own peninsula and that it is prey to the whims of history.The Hav of Last Letters is distinctly 20th century, post-colonial, messy, in some ways prejudiced and always threatened by the spectre of conflict. Hav of the 21st century is wealthier (although not equitably so), sanitized, and more suspicious. Hav of the Myrmidons is decidedly less authentic, but Morris contrasts the two admirably without rushing to value judgements.

All in all I found Hav to be a pleasurable and thoughtful read, if not thrilling. If you’re interested in exercises in imagination, history, and strong style you’ll probably like it. My version came with a foreword by Ursula K Le Guin that was characteristically insightful.
...more

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Jan 01, 2019 Googoogjoob rated it it was amazing

I probably have a lot of things to say about this book, but I've just finished reading it for the first time, and I haven't quite digested it yet. The 4/5 stars is necessarily preliminary and I might bump it up to 5 (or, less likely, down to 3). I'm making this review, now, however, to rant about something.

The edition I read is atrociously proofread and edited. Like, on par with a self-published print-on-demand book. The edition I have is the 2011 New York Review Books edition, which includes I probably have a lot of things to say about this book, but I've just finished reading it for the first time, and I haven't quite digested it yet. The 4/5 stars is necessarily preliminary and I might bump it up to 5 (or, less likely, down to 3). I'm making this review, now, however, to rant about something.

The edition I read is atrociously proofread and edited. Like, on par with a self-published print-on-demand book. The edition I have is the 2011 New York Review Books edition, which includes both Last Letters and Myrmidons, and is, as far as I can tell, the only American edition of the book which includes both books (the latter of which, as far as I know, is unavailable on its own).

There are many, many errors which appear to stem from inadequately proofread OCR output; the errors are more frequent in Last Letters, but are present in Myrmidons as well. It looks like the text was OCR'd, then run through a simple spellchecker, but not actually read over by any humans. There are many punctuation errors- commas and colons in place of periods, semicolons in place of commas, doubled periods, missing spaces following punctuation, missing quotation marks, missing or extra parentheses.

I say the text was probably run through a spellchecker because there are many cases where a common noun is replaced with a (correctly-spelled but incorrect) different common noun, while spelling errors in proper nouns are allowed to stand, as many automatic spellcheckers ignore proper nouns, because no spellcheck database can ever have a complete library of proper nouns to check against. Thus, the text features for example "heir" for "their," and, more comically, "ferry-built" and "generically-modified;" but then "Serenissirna" for "Serenissima" (referring to Venice; the "rn" for "m" is a telltale OCR error), and "Souza" for "Sousa." In at least one place- although this is not a spellchecking error, and probably not an OCR error- the character named "Yasar" is referred to in the same paragraph as "Yazin."

It is, I think, a very good book, and it deserves better than this: to have the reader repeatedly and regularly ejected from the flow of the text by embarrassing errors that any competent publisher would have caught and excised. ...more

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May 09, 2020 Ben rated it it was amazing

I cant decide whether lockdown is the best or worst scenario for reading a book that makes me want to travel to a place that does not exist. Regardless, Jan Morriss fictional travelogue of Hav, a multicultural peninsula on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, is thoroughly charming. She focuses on her imagined encounters with the inhabitants of Hav and, through them, constructs a convincing geography and history. Her decision not to make it a Utopia lends an air of veracity to Morriss ...more

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Jan 22, 2020 Jeff rated it it was amazing

Words always fail me, but I can confidently say this much: wonderful.

I had so much fun getting lost in this non-existent place; my imagination was stimulated to an extent that fiction rarely manages. When I was done, I wanted--like so many others, I'm sure--for Hav to be real. Maybe that misses the author's intent, but the sincere attempt to steep this one place in so many cultures instilled a sense of wonderment in me; it made me look back on the interweaving insanity of human history and ...more

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Mar 29, 2018 Justin Echols rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: anglo-lit

Two books in one; who doesn't love that?

The first part - "Last Letters from Hav" - is a pleasant, nostalgic, whimsical little travelogue of the sort of place we longed to travel to at least once in our lives. The exotic cultures, food, history; all give this imaginary land an image of a place extant despite the times.

The second part - "Hav of the Myrmidons" - is more of an allegory, a dark one at that. Without spoiling anything, this novella will awaken you from any nostalgia you may have felt ...more

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Mar 09, 2012 Chris rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, literature

Despite irritating minor typos (not even corrected in the paperback edition) this is a wonderful book obsessing on dualities: ancient and modern, East and West, Light and Dark, land and sea, transparency and the occluded. The addition of Hav of the Myrmidons in 2006 to the 1985 Last Letters from Hav (presumably written as if to Morris' partner Elizabeth) adds to that sense of duality: as the earlier Letters ended a half year of somnolent unreality with the brutal suddenness of the Intervention, Despite irritating minor typos (not even corrected in the paperback edition) this is a wonderful book obsessing on dualities: ancient and modern, East and West, Light and Dark, land and sea, transparency and the occluded. The addition of Hav of the Myrmidons in 2006 to the 1985 Last Letters from Hav (presumably written as if to Morris' partner Elizabeth) adds to that sense of duality: as the earlier Letters ended a half year of somnolent unreality with the brutal suddenness of the Intervention, so does the mirroring second half of Hav end a six day tour of puzzling contradictions with a brusque departure.

Hav appears to be an independent state on a peninsula of Asia Minor, close enough to the known site of Troy to have been considered, Morris suggests, a contender; like Troy it has been coveted by other nation states, squabbled over by invading armies and temporarily ruled by transient empires. Hav itself is like an amalgam of all those liminal territories such as Hong Kong or Trieste that Morris herself has visited for her travelogues, and resonant with echoes of a few other polities such as Istanbul or Malta which have been at the crossroads of cultures. The Hav of the 1980s is a little quaint, a relic of its past histories but decaying in its inertia. While no less Kafkaesque post-9/11 Hav no longer retains its picture postcard attraction: all that has mostly been swept away by the sinister but shadowy forces behind the Intervention, leaving tourists in a modernist enclave and a population that is even more reticent to disclose what, if anything, is controlling Hav.

Morris' persona observes topography and demography alike with poetry and seeming ingenuousness, her descriptive and narrative skills making much of her imaginary land very real and believable. In the 1980s you mourn the imminent passing of an exotic state that has become anachronistic; in the new millennium you despair of the faceless machine that it has become. While Morris gets to meet many of her previous 1986 acquaintances in 2005, she is unable to get to the heart of what Hav has really become, though we can guess that the state has succumbed to the fate of many a nation turned totalitarian and subjected to a cultural revolution.

For anyone remotely interested in history and culture and in dialogue and interaction Morris' book has much to admire and celebrate. Aided by two outline maps separated by two decades, plus uncredited sketches presumably by Morris herself (the second group clearly being executed in seeming haste), she artlessly delineates the surviving architecture and hinterland of Hav City, blending the rich heritages of the Mediterranean and beyond into what at first seems an idealised backwater jewel surviving on past glories but which violently metamorphoses into another faceless metropolis of thrusting highrise structures, epitomised by the 2000-ft Myrmidonic Tower rivalling anything that Dubai can offer and twice as high as the Eiffel Tower or the London Shard.

I've already mentioned the notion of dualities that permeates Hav which is underlined by the Manichaean religion of the Cathar sect that emerges in the first part to rule the Holy Myrmidonic Republic in the second. The other notion that saturates the novel is the circular labyrinth, and though Morris never illustrates the exact form that this takes it is clear that it is not the simple unicursal or Cretan labyrinth that we have to imagine but the multicursal maze with numerous dead ends, where often as we seem to be approaching the centre the path veers off confusingly in another direction. And it is in the conjunction of duality and labryrinth that I think we have to find a key to what Hav is about.

Morris seems well aware of the contradictions that she encapsulates: gender-reassigned herself, she has veered from active service as a soldier in World War II to reportage as a travel-writer post-surgery. Her mother was English, and she was born in Somerset (perhaps the region referred to in a medieval Latin pun as 'the Summer Country'); her father was Welsh, however, and she certainly regards herself as Welsh, so it is noteworthy that she surmises that the name of Hav is derived from a pan-Celtic word meaning 'summer'. The puns don't just stop there. Morris is of course a common Welsh name, which may owe its popularity not just to medieval Norman influence but also ultimately to the Roman name Mauricius, from maurus meaning Moorish or dark-skinned, and which is thus a wonderfully ambivalent name.

A solution of sorts to the enigma that is Hav may come from the image of the pencil-thin Myrmidonic Tower that ends the novel. Standing moreorless centrally on the Lazaretto island, with its streets deliberately laid out in labyrinthine fashion, the tower looks down on a Borgesian pattern that most resembles the folds of a human brain. At the very close of the final chapter, as Morris flies from Hav for the last time as a persona non grata, she spies the giant letter M at the Tower's summit "shining there fainter and fainter, smaller and smaller," and she speculates on what the letter really stands for. Myrmidons, the legendary warriors of Achilles? Manichaean? Maze? "Or, could it possibly be ... 'M' for Me?" She can't really be clearer, I think: M is for Morris, the tourist who visits liminal places which exist only in her mind. What a privilege then that she agrees to share her experiences with us. ...more

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Mar 26, 2020 Victoria Jackson rated it really liked it

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's very intelligent and weaves concepts and memories of other places, maybe in Europe, maybe the Middle East, maybe the Ottoman Empire, into the fictional city of Hav.

Whilst familiar with the author, I wasn't familiar with this book and it took me a short while to realise it was a fictional city. This added to its charm.

Great read by a fascinating author. Will now go back and read some of her "real" travelogues.

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Oct 22, 2017 Waqas Qazi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Magnificent thought and idea, and such wonderful execution in writing.

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Feb 03, 2018 Phil rated it really liked it

Shelves: uk, travel

a very good travelogue about an imaginary place mixing both political and tourism to it. I quite enjoyed this read

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About Jan Morris

Jan Morris

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Jan Morris is a British historian, author and travel writer. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, ...more