Chasing the Monsoon: A Modern Pilgrimage Through India

by Alexander Frater, Bernard Mayes (Narrator)

This is the inspiring story of how one man realized his dream of witnessing firsthand the most dramatic of meteorological the Indian monsoon.

Alexander Frater spent the first six years of his life on a South Pacific island, where his father, the only doctor within a thousand square miles, encouraged his fascination with and respect for the volatile play of the elements. Frater brings this heritage to his observations on the monsoon, following it from its burst on the beaches of Trivandrum through Delhi and Calcutta, across Bangladesh, to its finale in the town of Cherrapunji, the "wettest place on Earth". With exceptional sensitivity and wit, Frater uses fact, impression, and anecdote to vividly describe his own experience of the monsoon while also illustrating the towering influence of nature over the lives of Indians.

Audible Audio

Published February 1, 2016

About the author

Alexander Frater has contributed to various UK publications--Miles Kington called him "the funniest man who wrote for Punch since the war"--and been a contracted New Yorker writer; as chief travel correspondent of the London Observer he won an unprecedented number of British Press Travel Awards. Two of his books, Beyond the Blue Horizon and Chasing the Monsoon, have been been into major BBC television films. One, the Last Aftican Flying Bat (based on the former), took the Bafta award for best single documentary, while a programme for BBC Radio 4 (about his South Seas birthplace) was named overall winner of the Travelex Travel Writers' Awards. He lives in London, though, whenever time and money allow, is likely to be found skulking deep in the hot, wet tropics.