Bandit Roads
On sale
4th June 2009
Price: £18.99
‘A sizzling, white-knuckle read’ Daily Mail
‘A raw, colourful tour through the Sierra Madre… Grant is a cracking writer’ Financial Times
‘Read this brilliant book and be grateful he survived to tell the tale’ Maxim
‘A gripping account of Grant’s journey into the badlands of northern Mexico’ Sunday Times Travel
There are many ways to die in the Sierra Madre, a notorious nine-hundred-mile mountain range in northern Mexico where AK-47s are fetish objects, the law is almost non-existent and power lies in the hands of brutal drug mafias. Richard Grant thought it would be a good idea to travel the length of the Sierra Madre and write a book about it.
He was warned before he left that he would be killed. But driven by what he calls ‘an unfortunate fascination’ for this mysterious region, Grant sets off anyway. In a remarkable piece of investigative writing, he evokes a sinister, surreal landscape of hostile villages and an outlaw culture where homicide is the most common cause of death and grandmothers sell cocaine.
‘A raw, colourful tour through the Sierra Madre… Grant is a cracking writer’ Financial Times
‘Read this brilliant book and be grateful he survived to tell the tale’ Maxim
‘A gripping account of Grant’s journey into the badlands of northern Mexico’ Sunday Times Travel
There are many ways to die in the Sierra Madre, a notorious nine-hundred-mile mountain range in northern Mexico where AK-47s are fetish objects, the law is almost non-existent and power lies in the hands of brutal drug mafias. Richard Grant thought it would be a good idea to travel the length of the Sierra Madre and write a book about it.
He was warned before he left that he would be killed. But driven by what he calls ‘an unfortunate fascination’ for this mysterious region, Grant sets off anyway. In a remarkable piece of investigative writing, he evokes a sinister, surreal landscape of hostile villages and an outlaw culture where homicide is the most common cause of death and grandmothers sell cocaine.
Reviews
Travel books have a nasty tendency to become self-indulgent narratives on pottering through Tuscany or the south of France. Not this one - it's a gripping account of Grant's journey into the badlands of northern Mexico, where he meets and mixes with drug dealers, killers and violent drunks . . . even though Grant has an obvious ease with people, he seems as foolhardy as he is brave. Luckily he lived to tell the tale
Erudite & street-smart... that rare thing: a travel writer who not only amuses & informs but also reappraises a well trodden landscape with brio & originality
A raw, colourful tour through the Sierra Madre . . . he is a cracking travel writer, and his book brims with revealing conversations, escapades and history
A sizzling, white-knuckle read
What Grant excels at is capturing that moment of animal fear when he's surrounded by cocaine-fuelled, drunk and inexplicably hostile drug smugglers and realises just how much trouble he's in
His yarn rips along to a staccato soundtrack of gunfire and inventive obscenities from some of the most unrighteous examples of humanity alive
[Grant] brings to light a range of darkly romantic wanderers who strayed from the American mainstream while exemplifying the American Dream
His yarn rips along to a staccato sound-track of gunfire and inventive obscenities from some of the most unrighteous examples of humanity alive' Peter Carty, INDEPENDENT
....the freshest travel book on the US in a long time & one of the best short entrees to its history & culture
If there's plenty here to make the heart pound, there's also much to exercise the brain, as Grant unearths fascinating nuggets of history, ponders the fate of Indian tribes, and tries to fathom the surreal, superstitious, Mexican world view. So - a brave adventure or a reckless ego trip? A bit of both, but with its whip-smart dialogue, unyielding landscapes and gloriously filthy humour, this is undoubtedly the book the Sierra Madre deserves
Incredible: an exhilarating travel yarn that sees Grant creep past heavily armed drugs farms, ride mules along lethal switchback trails into gorges and run for his life, chased by a gang of coked-up, AK-47 wielding mercenaries who want to kill him for shits and giggles. Read this brilliant book and be grateful he survived to tell the tale
This is wonderfully vigorous writing, with meat and balls. In a world of travel writing often dominated by tortuous psychological journeys, it's refreshing to discover a writer who isn't afraid to look boldly out, rather than in