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I, Wabenzi by Rafi Zabor

Travel/ Memoir
January 2007
Paperback (198 x 129mm)
£9.99
480pp
978 1 84627 027 7
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'Brilliant, funny, fingernails-in-the-palm self-aware. It's as if Zabor is the world's most marvellous cab driver - he picks his readers up and takes them on the most fascinating, colourful detour imaginable... I will never forget the journey.' Daily Telegraph

'Zabor's prose unspools like a jazz riff, painting pictures and setting moods. He's riffing on nothing smaller than the human experience and he sends the reader's mind on parallel journeys. Zabor lets us lose ourselves even as he's finding himself.' New York Times

'A multilayered, metaphoric, mystical, jazzy, jiving, free-associating, freewheeling and delirious autobiographical journey' The Times

Some time ago, Rafi Zabor sat down to write a brief account of 1986. That was the year after his parents died, the year he intended to leave Brooklyn, buy a used car, and drive it across Europe to his golden destination, Istanbul. But like Zabor's journey, this 'brief account' took on a direction of its own - through the shtetl of his father's childhood, via the music of John Coltrane, in the company of a raggle-taggle collection of his family of chancers, dreamers, misfits and magicians. Sitting in the passenger seat, the reader is taken on a mad, exhilarating, beautiful ride, encountering life and death, and a little piece of what lies beyond.