Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91 - Tapa dura

This is the story of Rimbaud's 'lost years', the years after he turned his back on poetry, and fame, and France, for a life of wandering and obscurity in the wilds of East Africa. In this compelling biographical study, Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of Rimbaud's life as a trader, explorer and gun-runner in Africa. We follow his trail across the Somali desert, through the backstreets of Djibouti, and into the highlands of Ethiopia. We glimpse him with his Abyssinian mistress in Aden; walking the souks of Cairo with twenty pounds of gold round his waist; crossing the Danakil desert with a camel-train of Remington rifles. The journey leads also into the strange psychological terrain of Rimbaud's obsessive desire to escape, to disappear. For in Africa, as Charles Nicholl shows in this fascinating book, Rimbaud seems to have lived out that mysterious pronouncement of his teenage years: 'Je est un autre' - I is someone else...

Charles Nicholl's books include two acclaimed travel books, The Fruit Palace and Borderlines, The Reckoning - an investigation into the murder of Chirstopher Marlowe, for which he won the Crime Writers' Association Non-fiction Gold Dagger Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Creature in the Map.