Hav

Travel writer Jan Morris creates an enigmatic, labyrinthine fictional city in this extraordinary triumph of the imagination. For Hav exists only in one special place - Jan Morris's imagination. Hav gives us Jan Morris at her most delightful and most suggestive. 

In the last months of 1985, Jan Morris was commissioned by an American magazine to write a series of letters from Hav. She remained there until the day of the invasion, and this book is the result. It is the first substantial portrait ever drawn of a city that enthralled such literary visitors as Marco Polo, Mark Twain, Tolstoy and D.H. Lawrence, but which remains, thanks to its political and geographical situation - and entirely imaginary status - virtually unknown to ordinary travellers.

When Morris published Last Letters From Hav in 1985, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Here it is joined by Hav Of The Myrmidons, a sequel that brings the story up-to-date. Twenty-first-century Hav is nearly unrecognizable. Sanitized and monetized, it is ruled by a group of fanatics who have rewritten its history to reflect their own blinkered view of the past.

Morris’s only novel is a dazzlingly sui-generis, part erudite travel memoir, part speculative fiction, part cautionary political tale. It transports the reader to an extraordinary place that never was, but could well be.

Jan Morris's books include Coronation Everest, Venice, The Pax Britannica Trilogy and Conundrum. She was also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. A collection of her travel writing and reportage from over five decades, A Writer’s World, was published in 2003. Last Letters from Hav, a novel, was published in a new and expanded form in 2006.