On the 20th May the Indian summer monsoon will begin to envelop the country in two great wet arms, one coming from the east, the other from the west. They are united over central India around the 10th July, a date that can be calculated to within seven or eight days.
Frater follows the monsoon, staying sometimes behind it, sometimes in front of it, and always watching the impact of this extraordinary phenomenon.
During the anxious waiting, the weather forecaster is king, and a joyful period ensues: there is a time of promiscuity, and scandals proliferate. It takes him from Bangkok to Akyab in Burma (where the front funnels up between the mountains and the sea).
Alexander Frater's fascinating narrative reveals the exotic, often startling discoveries of an ambitious and irresistibly romantic adventure. Alexander Frater has contributed to various UK publications - Miles Kington called him "the funniest man who wrote for Punch since the war" - and been a contracted New Yorker writer; as chief travel correspondent of The London Observer he won an unprecedented number of British Press Travel Awards. Two of his books, Beyond the Blue Horizon and Chasing the Monsoon, have been made into major BBC television films. One, The Last African Flying Boat (based on the former), took the BAFTA award for best single documentary, while a program for BBC Radio 4 (about his South Seas birthplace) was named overall winner of the Travelex Travel Writers' Awards. His most recent book is Tales from the Torrid Zone. He lives in London, though, whenever time and money allow, is likely to be found skulking deep in the hot, wet tropics.
