
Three Quarters of a Footprint
Travels in South India
Joe Roberts(Author)
Eland Publishing Ltd
Published on 7. November 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-1-78060-219-6 (ISBN)
Description
Joe Roberts stayed for five months with the Trivedi family in Bangalore, while travelling all over southern India. In Pondicherry he found Rita, a melancholic divorcee banished to an ashram. He saw the great temple at Madurai, watched the snakeboat races at Arunmala, stayed with Syriac Christians at Cochin and was offered heroin in the Jewish cemetery. Wherever he went 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 . Three Quarters of a Footprint 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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 215 mm
Width: 138 mm
Thickness: 26 mm
Weight
350 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78060-219-6 (9781780602196)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
09/2024
Eland Publishing
€11.99
Available for download
Person
Joe Roberts was born in Bath in 1958. Educated in England, in his twenties he lived in America working as a bookseller in Manhattan and a baker in Austin, Texas, returning to Bath to continue work as a bookseller and restaurant cook. In 1990 he travelled to southern India for seven months, the first of many trips to a country he visited regularly and wrote about for the rest of his life - and where he met his wife, Emma. Three-Quarters of a Footprint was first published by Bantam in 1994. It was followed by The House of Blue Lights and Abdul's Taxi to Kalighat and Bengal, The Cold Weather, 1873, about Edward Lear's visit to India. He also taught creative writing at Bath Spa University and Ashoka University. A gifted cook, talker and maker of friends, Joe's family table (he and Emma had three sons) was always a place for good food and lively conversation. Joe's interests were broad, but his real passion was always for India. At the time of his unexpected death in 2023 he was working on a childhood memoir.