In striking prose, Larkin leads us through modern-day Burma (or Myanmar), a land ruled by a military junta whose strict rule is chillingly Orwellian. Larkin interweaves her travels in the footsteps of Orwell, once a British colonial officer in Burma, with interviews and an astute modern history lesson. Despite government restrictions, many of the people she interviews remain committed to literature and intellectual freedom. Her ability to gain access to the private recesses in which they secretly exercise their intellectual freedom makes this book all the more remarkable and moving. "Mournful, meditative, appealingly idiosyncratic . . . an exercise in literary detection but also a political travelogue."
—The New York Times