Blind Spot

With few exceptions, the photos here memorialise such items, ostensibly common things made radiant by the quality of Cole’s looking ... A master … In this new, luminous book, Cole shows himself to be really one of the best at seeing.

Taken alongside his fiction and his essays, which range from the reflective to the polemical, as well as the photography column he writes for the New York Times, Blind Spot further enhances Cole’s already burnished reputation. He is a writer for our times, prodigious, wide-ranging and supremely confident in his reach…. If there is a personal touchstone for this kind of cross-fertilisation, it is surely the late John Berger...

A novelist’s meditation on photography makes unexpected connections ... This book gives you a chance to glimpse things that might have slipped your attention otherwise.

Teju Cole’s photography and writing join together to form what really is a book of poetry—gorgeously cloth-bound and the kind of book you want to keep on display long after you’ve done the reading.

Novelist and New York Times critic Teju Cole is that rare combination of a writer and equally adept photographer. This roadtrip diary pairs everyday scenes that Cole has collected with his impressions of these places, their history and their artistic and literary associations. He has a delightful eye for reflections that merge deliriously and duplicitously with their surroundings. This travelogue avoids any whiff of tourism and demands a curious audience.

An existential door-stopper of a travel diary. A thing that's aesthetically pleasing enough to boost your coffee-table game and also make you feel smarter and better travelled than you actually are... A beautiful treatise on what travelling should be