Squeezed in between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide - not a country which lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler found out when she travelled alone with two carpetbags from the top to the bottom, form the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica.

This is Sara Wheeler's account of a six-month odyssey which included Christmas Day at 13,000 feet with a llama sandwich, a sex hotel in Santiago and a trip round Cape Horn delivering a coffin. Eloquent, astute and amusing, CHILE: TRAVELS IN A THIN COUNTRY confirms Sara Wheeler's place in the front rank of today's travel writers.

lively and sympathetic...Sara Wheeler is very well worth reading. * DAILY TELEGRAPH *
a perceptive and entertaining account. * NEW STATESMAN AND SOCIETY *
a thorougly enjoyable book with plenty of humour. * TODAY *
Chance meetings and planned visits are described with enough imagery and dialogue to make you pack your rucksack before finishing the book. * NORTHERN ECHO *

Sara Wheeler's books include the international bestseller Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, Chile: Travels in a Thin Country,Evia: An Island Apart and The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, which was chosen as Book of the Year by Will Self, Michael Palin, A. N. Wilson and others. She has published two biographies of travellers: Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton, and was immensely relieved to write about women at last in O My America! She lives in London.