Malcolm Pryce's top 10 expatriate tales
From Graham Greene's novels to Thomas Cook's timetables, the novelist settles on the best rootless reads

Malcolm Pryce writing in the guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 May 2009

Michael Caine as Fowler in The Quiet American. Photograph: PR

Malcolm Pryce finished his first novel on a cargo ship off the coast of South America and has spent much of the past 10 years abroad somewhere, writing a series of comic private detective novels set in Aberystwyth.

His latest novel, From Aberystwyth With Love, documents the search for Hughesovka, a legendary replica Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine in the last century.
From Aberystwyth With Love
by Malcolm Pryce
288pp,
Bloomsbury,
£11.99
"All my life I have been fascinated by tales of those vagabond souls who go off searching for promised lands and Shangri-las. People who sailed beyond the dawn driven by the belief that the other man's grass skirt was always greener. It's probably why I have devoted my life to chronicling those spiritual misfits, the people of Aberystwyth."

1. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Ostensibly it is about the eponymous quiet American – a naive and idealistic CIA agent in Saigon during the French colonial war of the 50s. But what lingers is the relationship between the world-weary newspaper correspondent, Fowler, and his beautiful girl Phuong. Greene perfectly skewers the superfluity of western notions of love that invariably inform such situations. Undermining the idyll is the mercenary elder sister, painfully aware of the need to use Phuong's beauty to secure a provider for the family while her beauty still has currency.

2. A Woman of Bangkok by Jack Reynolds
One night in Bangkok, so the song goes, makes a hard man humble. The city is, in fact, a combine harvester for the ex-pat male heart. Jack Reynolds captures the ethos perfectly in this, the definitive account, written 50 years ago. A young and unworldly Englishman is posted to Bangkok and falls for a beautiful dancing girl in the Bolero nightclub. The girl requites his love by spit-roasting him with scorn, and turning him into a chump. Reynolds chronicles the various stages of his downfall, without mercy. Read it before you get posted, but don't expect it to save you.

3. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
After reading this many years ago I vowed never to visit the city. How could it possibly live up to its fictional portrayal? An unnamed English teacher on a Greek island looks back on his sojourn in Alexandria between the wars. He considers the intertwined fates of the people he met there; they are numerous, but the real protagonist is the city herself, exquisitely presented in all her shifting moods and lemon-tinged light. Some tastes might find the relentlessly extended languor a touch too much, in which case John Crace's satirical digested read [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/29/digested-classics-justine-lawrence-durrell] of the first book, Justine, is a perfect antidote.

4. The Discovery of Tahiti; a journal of the second voyage of HMS Dolphin round the world under the command of Captain Wallis, RN, in the years 1766, 1767, and 1768, written by her master George Robertson
He didn't actually settle there but his description of the island set the tone for the innumerable vagabonds, beachcombers, castaways, mutineers, buccaneers, poets, lovers, dreamers, romantics, and novelists from Aberystwyth who have since fetched up on those parakeet-coloured shores. The salt-rimed tars who had spent six months in the foetid wooden hold of the HMS Dolphin suddenly found themselves in a land where sex was offered to weary travellers as naturally as food. Each one found a sweetheart and all she asked in return was a ship's nail. All was bliss until the ship fell apart. I went there with a ship full of nails but the price had gone up.

5. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
"Mum, I'm nineteen and I've decided it's time I sought my fortune. I will walk to Spain. I'll land in Vigo and walk the breadth of the land, playing my violin, getting drunk on sherry and sleeping under the stars with a sloe-eyed sweetheart in my arms."Sounds like a good plan, son, I'll make you some treacle biscuits."And off he went. That's it in a nutshell, but it's well worth reading the whole thing.

For Pryce's interesting numbers 6 - 10 selections link to The Guardian online.