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  • Published: 15 January 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099502388
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Panther Soup

A European Journey in War and Peace




A chance encounter with an American WWII veteran leads John Gimlette, the award-winning travel writer, on an astonishing journey through France, Germany and Austria.

By the end of World War II much of Western Europe was in chaos. The future of our world had been contested here, in the hinterlands of France and across the German plains. But what's become of the battlefields now? Or the people that lived on them? And is there any trace of the 2.7 million Americans who smashed their way into the Reich (or the 12 million that followed)? With questions like these, the award-winning travel writer John Gimlette, guided by WWII veteran Putnam Flint, sets off on an astonishing journey into the past.

  • Published: 15 January 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099502388
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

About the author

John Gimlette

John Gimlette is a well-established travel writer, having won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and the Wanderlust Travel Writing Award. He writes regularly for a number of broadsheets. His first book, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels through Paraguay, was published in 2003 to massive critical acclaim. Theatre of Fish, set in Newfoundland and Labrador, was published in 2005, followed by Panther Soup (2005) and Wild Coast (2012), which takes the reader through Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana. When not probing the extreme corners of the Earth he practises as a barrister in London.

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Praise for Panther Soup

One of the quirkiest, most thoughtful and illuminating books to have come my way in a long time... Gimlette ranges far beyond his original remit into adventurous realms all his own

Literary Review

A very special piece of travel writing. To journey past familiar European landmarks with someone who knew them in the post-war chaos of the 1940s is both moving and illuminating

Tim Butcher, author of Blood River

A book that works on many levels - historical guide, social history, moving reunion of people and place - and does each superbly

Wanderlust

Gimlette has a gift for travel writing with details of the most intimate kind, the small change and ammunition of a soldier's life... A subtle book, with telling testimony from the survivors of what it was actually like to fight a war with few rules

Hugh Thomson, Independent

An important book, reminding us of the links between old and new world, ideals and ideologies, war and peace in our phoenix-like continent. It is at once raw and erudite, deeply moving and strangely leisurely. It's also rich in black humour and insight

Rory MacLean, Guardian

Travelling back through the final stages of the war... Gimlette discovers what happened to the battlefields, to the people who smashed their way across the continent, and to those who lived in the carnage... Gimlette is an assured enough writer to reveal a very different contemporary Europe, constructed on the smouldering ruins of its predecessor

Traveller

An original travel book, written in vigorous prose and exhaustively researched... it has at its heart a profound understanding of the "soup" - the chaos and madness - of war

Daily Telegraph

As a born traveller and writer, he takes an epicurean pleasure in place and language

Tom Fort, Sunday Telegraph