Free Better Than Fiction 2 by Lonely Planet Page A

something – I can smell it coming again.’
    The words settle heavily between us. ‘Except, Nanda,’ I start, ‘it presumes that I’m also deeply strange...’
    ‘Spanish liar!’ she squeals. ‘You’re a Spanish liar! You need a figura ! I’ll make one for you, and I’ll introduce you to all my friends in America...’ and through my cigarette smoke, over wine by the light of her gaze, the night becomes a kind of arrival. A docking at the wharf of great spirits, hearts, and minds. Of human turmoil and its answers in art. That Trojan intellect empties me out and pumps me full of the substance of art and life, makes me feel for the first time like a writer. She gives Hemingway’s blessing, speaks to me of him and his cohorts as of mutual friends we’d just been with. Then we kiss goodnight through the bars of her gate, and she is gone.

    Sometime later a sketch of the article she was writing arrived at my place in Ireland. It was a poetic piece on me and my book, to be published in an Italian daily.
    And there was my new figura – I’d virtually been raised by foxes in the wilderness, after my father’s suicide in New York.
    I wrote to Nanda about it. Raised by foxes is one thing; suicide was a little strong.
    ‘Spanish liar!’ she wrote back.
    We corresponded in handwriting for a time before her death, her last letter to me from a summer house in Portofino. And thinking about it now, I should have taken her advice. She not only passed on secrets and tips, she handed me a baton and a challenge. Still today my mind hunts Nanda and her advice.
    But maybe it’s not too late to follow what she gave me.
    After all, a suicide in the family can leave you confused.
    And foxes are no example for a growing boy.
DBC PIERRE is known as much for youthful scandal as for books. Australian-born and Mexican-raised, DBC Pierre was an artist, photographer, and designer before writing his first novel in 2001. His debut,  Vernon God Little , became the first book to win both a Booker and Whitbread prize, and went on to be published in 43 territories, leading to a further two novels – Ludmila’s Broken English  and Lights Out In Wonderland , in a loose trilogy of comedies.  Petit Mal , a `picture book for grown-ups’, followed in 2013, and the novella  Breakfast with the Borgias  in 2014. When not travelling, Pierre divides his time between the UK and a mountainside lair in County Leitrim, Ireland.

Swami Sand Castle
FRANCINE PROSE

    O nce, over lunch, I told an editor at a glossy travel magazine that I wanted to write a piece about the experience of not understanding a place, of being intrigued – but bewildered – the whole time I was there and leaving with no clear idea of what that place had been about. I’d said I’d noticed that the essays in his magazine were always written by travelers who seemed to know everything about their destinations long before they got there, or by writers who had a charming local friend who explained the region’s many appealing customs and attractions, preferably over dinner at a villa, and provided introductions to nearby Michelin-starred chefs and gourmet-food providers. Was I the only person who had ever gone somewhere, been confused, and felt that I’d never figured anything out? From across his plate of micro-greens, the editor stared at me as if I’d suggested writing a piece about the nicest places on the planet in which tocatch bubonic plague.
    So here is a story about one of those mysteries of travel that has remained in my mind as a succession of somewhat dreamlike events, and a series of questions.
    For years I couldn’t remember the name of the village. I’d search for it on maps, but all I knew was that it was somewhere on the coast of the Arabian Sea between Cochin and Trivandrum, in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Then one morning, not long ago, I woke up and thought: Varkala! I googled the town, which turns out to have developed (surprise!) dozens of luxury