Paul Theroux, novelist and essayist as well as travel writer, has been on the road in Mexico for his latest book, which is assessed in the Literary Review by Sara Wheeler. It is, she notes, his fifty-first full-length work. “Demoralising news for the sluggish, especially as… On the Plain of Snakes is a superb book from a master of his craft, and perhaps the author’s best [travel book] yet. A few young authors are making headway in the… genre Theroux practically reinvented in the 1970s. But they still can’t touch him.”