Colin Thubron is an example of the doubly talented writer. He is best known as a travel writer. In fact, according to Jeremy Atiyah, Thubron is "the greatest travel writer of his generation" (The Independent, 10 October 1999). He was awarded a fellowship in the Royal Society of Literature in 1969, before any of his fiction had been published, and his travel books have a much stronger history of publishing success in the United States. But he is also a powerful novelist, author of six varied works ranging from a novel about the conversion to Christianity of the Emperor Constantine to a love story set in and around a small-time traveling circus in England. There are several connections between the two sides of his career. Penny Perrick prefaced her 1991 interview with Thubron for The Sunday Times (London) with the observation that "the word 'distress' attaches itself to everything Colin Thubron writes...