In 2020, lockdown revealed a personal yearning for connection and stimulation. So I started a book club, connecting diverse friends from different cities around the world. It seemed an antidote to the enforced isolation which made armchair travellers of us all.
We decided to focus on travel writing by non-native English writers. We ventured into Greenland with Danish explorer Peter Freuchen to boggle at horror stories of Inuit women of recent history, who when past child-bearing age would be “put out to pasture” to freeze in an Arctic wasteland. We questioned truth-telling in Ryszard Kapuściński’s African travelogue, The Shadow of the Sun, and admired the prose in In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki.
An international monthly book discussion on Zoom has its challenges; trying to dovetail time differences is one, remembering not to interrupt people is another. And so late last year, the club – reduced to nine stalwart members – met up in person at a villa called Dar Sinclair in Tangier, Morocco. American-Italian author Andrea di Robilant and parfumiere-photographer Marina Sersale, whose family own Italy’s legendary Le Sirenuse hotel, flew in from Rome; celebrated author Susan Minot caught the red-eye from New York, and the travel writer Sophy Roberts and my childhood friend Meredith Fall arrived from the UK. Other members were already in the city: entrepreneur John Gordon, creator of Intelligence Squared, and Moroccan-born travel expert Mehdi Rheljari.
Tangier has a vivid, layered history. Perched between Africa and Europe, it is a shocking collision of blues where the Mediterranean and Atlantic meet in a wrestling match of opposing currents and upswell. The city was a designated free zone before being absorbed as part of Morocco in 1956, governed by multiple European powers. Its unbuttoned spirit and licentiousness attracted artists and aristocrats – invariably second sons, writers, dropouts and spies. With jazzy breezes that keep the heat at bay, the sound of the muezzin as the soundtrack, it’s an invigorating and inspiring backdrop for a book club.
This sense of free-wheeling energy also vibrates through the five-bedroom house of Dar Sinclair. It is a house with a history, its nooks and crannies spilling onto a multi-terraced garden. Agapanthus, crinum lily and iris spread along pathways, spilling into each other like the chapters of a novel.
Conceived in the 1920s as the ultimate escapist dream, the house has always attracted a roll call of writers and artists, such as Tennessee Williams, David Herbert – dubbed “The Queen of Tangier” by friends including Ian Fleming – and Paul Bowles of The Sheltering Sky. The latter enlarged the villa’s social circle, introducing Moroccan artists like Mohamed M’rabet and Mohamed Choukri, the once-illiterate street urchin who became the celebrated author of, amongst other publications, Tales of Tangier, one of our assigned reads of the week.
