Bookseller, baker, restaurant cook, writer, teacher: Joe Roberts (1958-2023) was all of them. He was a traveller, too. In his twenties he worked in Manhattan and Austin, Texas, before returning to his birthplace of Bath. In 1990 he travelled to southern India for seven months, the first of many trips to a country he wrote about for the rest of his life (and where he met his wife, Emma). In his debut, Three-Quarters of a Footprint, he tells of his stay with the Trivedi family in Bangalore and his journeys all over the south. The book, first published by Bantam in 1994, reappears today under the imprint of Eland, which says that it “has long fascinated readers with its gentle, perceptive humour, chilled occasionally by a shadow of menace, as if the spirit and wit of R K Narayan had been reborn in an Englishman”. Wherever Roberts went, Eland says, “he met extraordinary people, but these encounters take second place to his ripening friendship with the Trivedi family, and his exact chronicling of their neighbours. As Major Trivedi warned him, ‘Nothing is as fixed as you think.’”