If you have been following me for a while, then you’ll know I read a lot of travel books. These are the conventional sort, a person heads off to another location in the world with the intention of discovering something from an unexplored corner or to experience another culture. They often discover as much about themselves in the process though. But there are little journeys that barely make it from the lesser pages of the newspapers or stories from the lower depths of the internet that rarely get heard about.

Jo Tinsley and David Bramwell have found these tiny personal odysseys and brought them together in this collection. You can read about the man who claim to have sailed around the world, whilst only going as far as the Atlantic, those that set off with the intention of finding the centre of the earth, POW’s who were helped in their escape by an unexpected source and complete cadavers and body parts that have kept moving long after you’d expect them to stop.

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

We do live in a strange world, and this great little collection goes some way to proving that the truth is often much stranger than fiction. Some of these tales are quite amusing and others are little tragedies but they are all fascinating in their own right. It fits in really well with The Mysterium and I am looking forward to the third book, The Odditorium, very soon. ( )