Overland by Yasmin Cordery Khan

 

Overland by Yasmin Cordery Khan.

Published in paperback 8th may 2025 by Apollo.

From the cover of the book:

It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime: the open road, London to Kathmandu, just three young people looking for adventure. No one could have predicted the way it ended, and for fifty years the truth has been buried. But now, Joyce is ready to tell her story.

London, 1970. Fresh out of a dead-end job, Joyce answers an ad in the local paper: Kathmandu by van, leave August. Share petrol and costs. Joyce is desperate to escape life in suburbia, and aristocrat Freddie looks like he can show her a wild time.

Together with Anton, Freddie's best friend from boarding school, they embark on the overland trail from London to Kathmandu in a beaten-up old Land Rover. But as they cross the borders into Asia, Freddie can't outrun his family's history, leading to devastating consequences for everyone.

Overland is a novel about youth, privilege, class and the sharp echoes of British imperialism from one of the most exciting new voices in literary fiction.

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London, 1970. Joyce yearns to leave the drudgery of her suburban life behind. When she spots an ad in the local paper: 'Kathmandu by van, leave August. Share petrol and costs', she sees it as a golden opportunity to escape.

Joining aristocrat Freddie and his best friend Anton for an adventure in a beaten up Land Rover seems like an impossible dream for someone like Joyce. They being their journey with hopeful hearts, but as the trio cross borders on the hippie trail, Joyce and Anton are dragged into the mire of Freddie's emotional baggage, and the dream turns sour...

Told in retrospective form through Joyce's narrative fifty years after her fateful trip with Freddie and Anton, Overland is compulsive reading about a time when hundreds and thousands of travellers completed the journey overland from Britain to India in pursuit of culture, a lifestyle free of convention, and the search for spiritual enlightenment. Unfortunately for our three adventurers, rather than finding what they were searching for, they end up losing themselves in the twists and turns of a long and winding journey that ends in tragedy.

Through Joyce's now jaded eyes, the story of her coming of age from unhappy suburban housewife to the sort of person her young self could never have envisaged, totally immerses you in time and place. Khan's novel rings with authenticity about the once well-trodden, but now impossible, overland journey through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, as Joyce gets to know her travelling companions, and their secrets - spilling her own in turn. 

The pages flew by as I was pulled into the increasingly dark story, and my emotions were well and truly tugged as Joyce tries to keep a hold on the vestiges of the person she believes herself to be while acting as protector for her 'boys'. Stark clashes of culture, and the wildly differing ideologies of the fellow travellers they meet on the trail, prove to be more of a challenge than any of them anticipated. The frailties they each wished to leave behind are exposed, and while Joyce and Anton fantasise about impossible futures, self-destructive Freddie falls apart (hastened by the psychologically fracturing impact of the heavy drug culture amongst the 'freaks' they meet).

Youth, expectation, privilege, and social class are insightfully dissected, bound up in a truly impressive literary novel that has Khan subtly tempting you on with timely titbits about the mystery at the heart of the story. Her background as a historian adds wonderful substance to this tale too, obliquely exploring the scars left by British colonialism while the dramatic events between the three travellers play out in the foreground.

I adored this book from wistful beginning to shocking end, via all its shades of love, loss and hard lessons, utterly addicted to Khan's writing, and the melancholy edge of a tale all about a past lost in the mists of time. Superb.

Overland is available to buy now in hardcover, paperback, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Head of Zeus for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest reivew.

About the author:

Yasmin Cordery Khan is a British historian and novelist, and teaches at the University of Oxford. She is the author of the Great Partition, The Raj at War (also published in the US as India at War) Edgware Road and Overland. She has been long listed for prizes including the Orwell Prize, the Authors' Club of Great Britain First Novel Prize, the PEN Hesell-Tiltman and won the Gladstone Prize for history.