Happy New Year, und einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr. Why the German? Because I’ve just learned that “Pravda Ha Ha” will be published in Germany in September by Karl Rauch Verlag, the publisher of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (“Night Flight”, “Wind, Sand and Stars” and “The Little Prince”). Hence it’s no wonder that my thoughts have taken flight.

I’m also thrilled to announce that before then – indeed in two days – Pravda Ha Ha will be released by Bloomsbury in the US and Canada. The first North American reviews are already in (one reviewer called it “the wildest travel book” he’d ever read and Mark Bowden, author of “Black Hawk Down”, wrote that “Pravda Ha Ha… does 1984 one better, because the dystopia MacLean describes already exists”).

In the UK, John le Carré – blessings upon him – called it “a gem of a book. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time” and Jan Morris gifted me a wonderful quote for the jacket “This is a tremendous thing that MacLean is creating; a new kind of history, in several dimensions and innumerable moods, that adds up to — across the span of his books — a great and continuing work of literature.”

So dear US and Canadian readers, don’t be shy – do feel free to order Pravda Ha Ha from Big Brother Amazon or – better still – your local bookshop.

January 1, 2020