Paradise Updated

There are precious few places still untouched by tourism. Paradise Lost? Chance would be a fine thing. More like Paradise Packaged, Marketed and Sold in Easy-to-Enjoy Portions. And if there’s money to be made shining light into the darkest corners of the world, SmallWorld wrote the book on it.

Robert Rind is a legend in travel writing circles, fiercely independent and resolutely old school. Too old school. The Company decides he’s a liability and sends young, pliable Mithra to tropical Maganda to take his place. But the guidebook writer’s life isn’t all bustling street markets and five-star resorts: as any seasoned traveller knows, things rarely go as planned and Robert Rind is unlikely to come quietly.

Mic Looby’s masterful debut novel weaves a hilarious and hair-raising tale of compromised idealism and corporate skullduggery. You’ll never open another guidebook without reading between the lines.

‘Think of a better Phaic Tan, a satirical package with political nous and a social conscience ... sharp and brave‘ – The Sunday Age

Mic Looby‘s Paradise Updated is my best rookie novel of the year - like early Waugh: comic with a sense of threat – Patrick McCaughey, Australian Book Review

‘Where Kohnstamm [Do all travel writers go to Hell?] struggled for drama, Looby sidesteps into fiction, to build narrative, throwing in hilarious characters with his own satirical squint at travel publishing‘ – The Age

‘Paradise Updated is a hugely entertaining travel adventure, and a meditation on the gap between reality and myth‘ – Sunday Tasmanian