Thubron’s elegant, elegiac and poignant book recounts his journey from the river’s source in the Mongolian mountains to Nikolaevsk.

Thubron may now be an octogenarian, but his new book, The Amur River: Between Russia and China, shows him still at the peak of his powers.

With ruminative gracefulness, [Thubron] describes his eastward.

Although an admirer of [Thubron's] works, I embarked on this one harbouring the dabbler’s secret fear of being awed but not entertained.

The scholar Edward Said would famously argue that travel writers’ creation of a backward 'Oriental' other was crucial not only to the inflated self-image of the West, but also to the actual maintenance of empire.

Thubron undertook to explore the entire length [of the Amur], and it’s an extraordinary journey, albeit one with very little sunlight of any kind along the way.

Thubron, now in his eighties, remains impressively consistent in his proclivity for spartan accommodations and opinionated, hard-living tour guides. But a new melancholy permeates his starkly elegant prose. The Amur was to be Russia’s 'artery to the Pacific,' full of promise. Instead, it became 'a labyrinth of shoals, shallows and dead ends,' a land of desolate beauty and stunted possibility..

The Amur River has made me think much more deeply about the specific power of writing about travel.

Thubron evokes in this breathtaking account the beauty and harshness of the 1,100-mile-long Amur River.

The celebrated British travel writer takes us on a fascinating journey along the Amur River.