Duende

The autobiography-as-travelogue that is also a rite of passage is a form which worked brilliantly for Laurie Lee and Bruce Chatwin - both novelists as well as seekers after the truth-behind-the-truth. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new star of the genre: Jason Webster

Daily Mail

His descriptions of troubled modern day Spain are mesmerising, but the greater curiosity is in seeing just how much trouble the confused innocent can create for himself before finding out whom he might really be

Daily Express

Wonderfully told, with enough detail about flamenco to educate the curious, and enough drama and characters to fill a novel, Webster may not have turned out to be a guitar maestro, but his journey is recounted like a master

Wanderlust

A powerful, dangerous book that should win many prizes

Conde Nast Traveller

Duende is an intensely personal portrait of a country in the throes of modernisation, whose spirit still defies definition

Observer

I found his descriptions of the Flamenco underworld irresistible... I couldn't put it down

Chris Stewart, author of Driving Over Lemons

An impressive debut... Duende sweeps along from one harmonious chord to the next and builds into a crescendo that is as rich in atmosphere and emotion as the world it seeks to portray... What it does most successfully is describe a young man's rite of passage through a foreign culture, a journey from which he emerges with a greater understanding of his subject and considerably wiser about the nature of human relationships. We sill be lucky if we see many such passionate and evocative travel books this year

The Sunday Times

Fascinating... The best travel writing is not about topography but people, and Webster's infiltration of this notoriously closed community makes for compulsive reading... Webster is an exceptional writer, and this is a great book

Guardian

Jason Webster may have started out by hoping that flamenco would provide him with a means of creative expression, but by the end it very much looks as if he has found his true voice as a writer

Sunday Telegraph

One of the best books ever written about Spain

Literary Review

Jason Webster portrays the sheer anarchy and passion of the place as convincingly as any of his more illustrious predecessors

Brimingham Post

Highly entertaining... Music, passion, drugs, 'a beakerful of the warm South' - who could resist all that in these dark days?

Time Out

The traditions of the Bildungsroman and the rites-of-passage novel have migrated into the travel genre

The Times Literary Supplement