The Fruit Palace
Charles Nicholl
  • Published: 3 July 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099274049
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:
Share…

The Fruit Palace

Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Find local retailers Find local retailers Abbeys Angus & Robertson Boomerang Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Your Bookstore

'A quite extraordinary travel book. It was a wild adventure that came off' Sunday Telegraph

Charles Nicholl is on a quest for 'The Great Cocaine Story'. The time is the early eighties and the place - Colombia. The Fruit Palace is a little whitewashed café that legally dispenses tropical fruit juices, has another purpose as the meeting place for a variety of black market activities and the place where Nicholl unwittingly begins his quest.

Nicholl relates his story with irrepressible energy and vividness as he careens from shantytowns and waterfront barrios to steamy jungle villages and slaughterhouses. He survives fever, earthquake, and discovery by a dealer who threatens to 'check his oil' with a knife. And he emerges with a triumphant piece of travel writing which is also a comic extravaganza.
  • Published: 3 July 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099274049
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Charles Nicholl

Charles Nicholl has written travel books, The Fruit Palace and Borderlines; a study of Elizabethan alchemy, The Chemical Theatre, and a biography of the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe, A Cup of News. He has also written a reconstruction of Sir Walter Raleigh's search for El Dorado, The Creature in the Map, and Somebody Else, which won the 1998 Hawthornden Prize and a biography of Christopher Marlowe, The Reckoning.

Charles Nicholl is the author of nine books of history, biography and travel, including the celebrated The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and the Crime Writers' Association 'Gold Dagger' Award for non-fiction), Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa (winner of the Hawthornden Prize), The Fruit Palace and The Creature in the Map. He has presented two documentaries for British television, and has lectured in Britain, Italy and the United States. He lives in Italy with his wife and children.

Also by Charles Nicholl

Traces Remain
The Lodger
Leonardo Da Vinci
The Reckoning
See all

Praise for The Fruit Palace

One of the most absorbing travel books I have read... No book I know gives a more perceptive glimpse of the life of the urban poor who are the majority of South Americans. A brilliant book, informative, well-written and fun to read

New York Times Book Review

Evokes that vague, sleepy enchantment which comes from dreaming of 'somewhere else'... There are echoes of Chandler, of Burroughs, of Baudelaire and even of Eliot

Sunday Times

Mr Nicholl proves himself an addictive storyteller-A delicious addition to the library of the Briton out of his depth abroad

Daily Telegraph

A considerable delight - funny, acute and remarkably evocative

Time Out

Irresistible.. His story is so good that at times it reads like an unusually well-written thriller, then suddenly it turns into lyrical, highly-descriptive travel writing

Irish Times