India Through Foreign Eyes

A Strange Kind of Paradise

From Thomas the Apostle to Slumdog Millionaire: how we imagine India, from the author of Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity.

Sam Miller has written a wonderfully witty, wise, idiosyncratic and properly hybrid book that achieves the near-impossible. It is at once a touching personal memoir, a droll and discursive travelogue and an erudite work of literary criticism which somehow manages to be, at the same time, a hugely entertaining history of the world's often confused dialogue with  South Asia over three thousand years. It is also, almost as an after-thought, a most moving love letter to India.

William Dalrymple, author of City of Djinns

[Miller] is a congenial guide. He has a fantastically sharp eye… Amid a torrent of sparkling details, what stands out is Miller's heartfelt love for the country.

Delightfully eccentric… A very readable account… Miller is the master of the must-read footnote, while matching the travel writer Eric Newby in his acute descriptions of contemporary life in India.

Laconic and engaging… [An] attractive book.

Fresh and forthright… Miller has a fantastically sharp eye for quirky details.

Those who know India will find his account sensitively reflects most aspects of that complex land; those who do not know it could hardly do better than to start here.

Far more than a simple narrative of experiences… A fascinating mixture of detailed descriptions spiced by revealing anecdotes, wild untruths and misunderstood behavior.

It depicts the much-explored India in new and inventive ways, full of fascinating details that leave one hungry for adventures in the land of spices and elephants.

This is a scholarly, readable and wonderfully eccentric homage to India as seen through foreign eyes

Sam Miller was born and brought up in London, but has spent much of his adult life in India. He is a former BBC journalist and is the author of Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity (2009), Blue Guide: India (2012) and A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes (2014). He is also the translator of The Marvellous (But Authentic) Adventures of Captain Corcoran (2016) by Alfred Assollant.

A Strange Kind of Paradise is an exploration of India’s past and present, from the perspective of a foreigner who has lived in India for many years. Sam Miller investigates how the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, Arabs, Africans, Europeans and Americans – everyone really, except for Indians themselves – came to imagine India. 
 
His account of the engagement between foreigners and India spans the centuries from Alexander the Great to Slumdog Millionaire. It features, among many others, Thomas the Apostle, the Chinese monk Xuanzang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Vasco da Gama, Babur, Clive of India, several Victorian pornographers, Mark Twain, E. M. Forster, Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles and Steve Jobs. Interspersed between these tales is the story of Sam Miller’s own 25-year-long love affair with India. 
 
The result is a spellbinding, 2,500-year-long journey through Indian history, culture and society, in the company of an author who informs, educates and entertains in equal measure, as he travels in the footsteps of foreign chroniclers, exposes some of their fabulous fantasies and overturns long-held stereotypes about race, identity and migration. At once scholarly and thought-provoking, delightfully eccentric and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is destined to become a much-loved classic.

Adventures in a Megacity

Delhi

An extraordinary portrait of one of the world's largest cities and India's baffling, bustling capital.

A wild, spiralling wonder of a book... the sharpest reflection of the capital since William Dalrymple's City of Djinns... Read this book and laugh, grow and gaze in gob-smacked wonder at India's whirling dreamtown

The liveliest of city travelogues, a beguiling introduction to the Indian capital and an irresistible read for even the faintly curious

A chronicle that rivals its subject matter in energy and scope... His talent is dizzying and his narrative a rich accomplishment. I walked miles in Delhi - without moving an inch

A dizzying, droll travelogue... Miller's multitudinous city snapshots elucidate the paradoxes of gloablisation without judgement, and his tales of urban wandering form a valuable archive of a rapidly transforming city. Miller's forays into city slums are poignant, humanising evocations of Delhi's underside

A thoroughly entertaining book - even down to the countless footnotes - about a fascinating city

Teems with strange stories and bizarre quiddities, rich discoveries and unexpected diversions....both a quest and a love letter, and one which is as pleasingly eccentric and anarchic as its subject

An erudite, comical portrait-of-a-city...an entertaining and thoughtful book

For all its entertaining eccentricities Delhi is careful to maintain a strong sense of the city's sad heritage of religious factionalism, pollution, rioting, poverty and crime.

A uniquely revealing travelogue, closer in spirit to WG Sebald and Ian Sinclair than the usual nostalgia-fest or trend-hunting of Britons' books about India.

Insatiably curious and pleasingly thorough... The Delhi in his writing is a diverse, energised dreamscape, filled with quirks and wonders, and this is among the best I've read for a cross-section of a city.

In an extraordinary portrayal of one of the world's fastest growing cities, Sam Miller sets out to discover the real Delhi. Following a spiral course through the city, he visits its less celebrated destinations; the unexpected, the ignored and the eccentric. 
 
Through his encounters with Delhi's people - from a professor of astrophysics to a crematorium attendant, from ragpickers to members of the Police Brass Band - Miller creates a richly entertaining portrait of what this megacity means to its residents. The modern Delhi he depicts, in all its humour and humanity, is one whose future concerns us all.

Sam Miller

A quiet and deeply affecting meditation on friendship and family secrets, Fathers glitters with love and uncertainty. Miller writes beautifully about mystery, memory, and how we choose our paths through life, how we decide who we are.

Fathers is something much more surprising than a literary life: both a touching celebration of a parent, and the gentle unraveling of a family secret.

I can’t remember when I have more enjoyed a memoir, in the reading and in the conversations in my head afterwards with its author. Fathers is a profoundly rich and rewarding experience and will be gobbled up by readers and writers.

Fathers… is not a misery memoir. Far from it. It is… a kind of detective story

This book began as an extension of the speech Sam made at his father’s funeral – and as a way to cope with his grief. It has become something else in the process: an exploration of love, sex, genetic disposition and what makes us who we are… There has been some remarkable dad lit over the last year… and Sam Miller’s is a fascinating addition to the genre… There may be some who would have preferred the story to stay in-house. And as Sam is quick to acknowledge, others would tell it differently. But his, the son’s version, is sunny: generous in spirit, exculpatory in tone, grateful rather than self-pitying.

This engaging book is not only a valuable portrait of the intensely private Karl Miller, but also a poignant account of the life of his beloved friend.

A very moving portrait of a startlingly charismatic figure.

It takes a sharp look at family life, at the mores of the 1960s and 1970s, at Karl Miller’s history and complex personality, and at friendship, death, revelation and affirmation. It is subtle and reflective. It is… of a luminous idiosyncrasy… Fathers, elegant, illuminating and deeply personal, is a fitting tribute to a distinctive man. It affords new insights into someone especially hard to pin down.

Tactfully composed and sensitively written, Fathers leaves an abiding impression of decent people doing their best in difficult circumstances.

Sam Miller's memoir Fathers is ostensibly about a family secret. But its true subject is a family silence… The book is about ways to be a father, but also, more generally, about ways to be a man, from the 1950s to now. Should you be an intellectual, and write letters full of irony and wit? How camp are you allowed to be, or how fearful of homoeroticism? Must you be good at manual labour? Where do you stand in relation to class or entitlement? Should you be more interested in football than you are?

Sam has written a moving memoir that reveals a life well lived.

Here, warts and all, is the story of Miller paterfamilias and grandfather Karl, who died in 2014, researched by Sam with care and attention… A certain sly, piquant humour runs like a seam through the narrative and there is much to ponder on in the matter of relationships, family and otherwise.

Sam discovered when he was a teenager, he is not, in fact, Karl Miller’s son, but the product of an on-again-off-again affair his mother, Jane, had with a family friend, Tony White… Fathers is Miller’s heartfelt attempt to come to terms with his complicated family, to consider the meaning of fatherhood and to grasp at the ghost of Tony White… His quest for a deeper understanding of his paternity is punctuated by his accounts of the months and weeks before his father’s death, a time to which he returns in his mind, painting a loving portrait of father and son. Something is missing, and yet nothing is missing.

In early 2014, after many years living abroad, Sam Miller returned to his childhood home in London. His father was dying. 
 
In the months after his death, Sam began to write about his father. He had been told, long ago, a family secret involving his parents and a close friend. Now, by reading his father’s papers and with the help of his mother, he was able to piece together a remarkable story. 
 
Fathers is the result: a tender, thoughtful exploration of childhood and parenthood, of friendship, love and loyalty.

Sam Miller

Praise for Fathers

A quiet and deeply affecting meditation on friendship and family secrets, Fathers glitters with love and uncertainty. Miller writes beautifully about mystery, memory, and how we choose our paths through life, ...

Fathers is something much more surprising than a literary life: both a touching celebration of a parent, and the gentle unraveling of a family secret.

I can’t remember when I have more enjoyed a memoir, in the reading and in the conversations in my head afterwards with its author. Fathers is a profoundly rich and rewarding experience and will be gobbled up ...

A quiet and deeply affecting meditation on friendship and family secrets, Fathers glitters with love and uncertainty. Miller writes beautifully about mystery, memory, and how we choose our paths through life, ...

Fathers is something much more surprising than a literary life: both a touching celebration of a parent, and the gentle unraveling of a family secret.

I can’t remember when I have more enjoyed a memoir, in the reading and in the conversations in my head afterwards with its author. Fathers is a profoundly rich and rewarding experience and will be gobbled up ...

A quiet and deeply affecting meditation on friendship and family secrets, Fathers glitters with love and uncertainty. Miller writes beautifully about mystery, memory, and how we choose our paths through life, ...

Fathers is something much more surprising than a literary life: both a touching celebration of a parent, and the gentle unraveling of a family secret.

I can’t remember when I have more enjoyed a memoir, in the reading and in the conversations in my head afterwards with its author. Fathers is a profoundly rich and rewarding experience and will be gobbled up ...

Books by Sam Miller

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter