Author Shahnaz Habib takes her travelling seriously and is determined to enjoy her wanderlust with a smile on her face.
And her love of discovering has led Habib to write a beautiful and illuminating cultural history of travel through her new book Airplane Mode.
Due to be released on 1st August 2024 by September Publishing, the book is so well written and researched that it has been long listed for the Andrew Carnegie medal of excellence in non-fiction.
For many, the conditions of travel have long been dictated by the colours of passports and skin and for Habib, travel and writing have always been complicated pleasures.
Habib threads her extensive research with an unflinchingly honest personal story – as an adult curious about the world, as a child on family vacations in India, and as an immigrant for whom round trips are an annual fact of life.
Woven through the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artefacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, trains, and the idea of wanderlust itself.
Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism – but as any traveller knows, travel is more than that.
As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled (and beloved) activity, asking the question: What does it actually mean to be a ‘joyous traveller’ when we live in the ruins of colonialism?
Told together with humour and ruthless honesty, the book is a read in one go type and its credit to the brilliance of Habib that the reader is kept enthralled throughout.
The Brooklyn based writer translates from her mother tongue, the south Indian language of Malayalam, and has translated two novels, Jasmine Days, winner of the 2018 JCB Prize, and Al Arabian Novel Factory.
Published: 1st August 2024
UK Price: £12.99
ISBN: 978-191461-370-8
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288 pages
Airplane Mode – Travels in the Ruins of Tourism
By Shahnaz Habib
Published by September Publishing
For more information on Airplane Mode and to pre-order a copy of the book, please visit: www.septemberpublishing.org.
Author Bio:
Rebecca Hay is an experienced travel writer and member of The British Guild of Travel Writers. Follow her adventures with her family on Twitter and Instagram @emojiadventurer and on Facebook via EmojiAdventurers2.
Images courtesy of September Publishing
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