Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Waldo | 1967 |
| Fong and the Indians | 1968 |
| Girls at Play | 1969 |
| Murder in Mount Holly | 1969 |
| Jungle Lovers | 1971 |
| Saint Jack | 1973 |
| The Black House | 1974 |
| The Family Arsenal | 1976 |
| Picture Palace | 1978 |
| The Mosquito Coast | 1981 |
| O-Zone | 1986 |
| My Secret History | 1989 |
| Chicago Loop | 1990 |
| Millroy the Magician | 1993 |
| My Other Life | 1996 |
| Kowloon Tong | 1997 |
| Hotel Honolulu | 2001 |
| Blinding Light | 2005 |
| A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta | 2009 |
| The Lower River | 2012 |
| Mother Land | 2017 |
| Under the Wave at Waimea | 2021 |
| The Bad Angel Brothers | 2022 |
| Burma Sahib | 2024 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| A Christmas Card | 1978 |
| London Snow | 1979 |
| Doctor Slaughter | 1984 |
| Dr. DeMarr | 1990 |
| The Greenest Island | 1995 |
| Nurse Wolf and Dr. Sacks | 2001 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Sinning with Annie and Other Stories | 1972 |
| The Consul’s File | 1977 |
| World’s End and Other Stories | 1980 |
| The London Embassy | 1982 |
| The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro and Other Stories | 2003 |
| The Elephanta Suite | 2007 |
| Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories | 2014 |
| The Vanishing Point: Stories | 2025 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work | 1972 |
| The Great Railway Bazaar | 1975 |
| The Old Patagonian Express | 1979 |
| The Kingdom by the Sea | 1983 |
| Sailing Through China | 1984 |
| Sunrise with Seamonsters | 1985 |
| The Imperial Way | 1985 |
| Patagonia Revisited (With: Bruce Chatwin) | 1985 |
| Riding the Iron Rooster | 1988 |
| The Happy Isles of Oceania | 1992 |
| The Pillars of Hercules | 1995 |
| Sir Vidia’s Shadow | 1998 |
| Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings | 2000 |
| Dark Star Safari | 2002 |
| Ghost Train to the Eastern Star | 2008 |
| The Tao of Travel | 2011 |
| The Last Train to Zona Verde | 2013 |
| Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads | 2015 |
| Figures in a Landscape: People and Places | 2018 |
| On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey | 2019 |
| True North: On the Road in Canada | 2026 |
About Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux is an American novelist and travel writer, born in Medford, Massachusetts, on 10 April 1941. He is best known for the railway travelogue “The Great Railway Bazaar” (1975) and for the novel “The Mosquito Coast” (1981), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was adapted as a 1986 film and a 2021 television series.
The third of seven children, Theroux studied at the University of Maine and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, graduating in English in 1963. He joined the Peace Corps that year as a teacher in Malawi, and was expelled from the country and the Corps in 1965 after helping a political opponent of Hastings Banda escape to Uganda. He then taught at Makerere University in Uganda, where he befriended V. S. Naipaul and published his first novel, “Waldo” (1967). After two years teaching in Singapore he settled in England in 1971.
“The Great Railway Bazaar”, an account of a four-month train journey in 1973 from London across Asia and back on the Trans-Siberian Railway, was his first major success as a travel writer. Later journeys produced “The Old Patagonian Express” (Boston to Argentina by train), “The Kingdom by the Sea” (around the coast of the United Kingdom), “Riding the Iron Rooster” (China), which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, “The Happy Isles of Oceania” and “Dark Star Safari” (Cairo to Cape Town). “Deep South” (2015) and “On the Plain of Snakes” (2019) cover the southern United States and Mexico.
His fiction often draws on the places he has lived. “Jungle Lovers” is set in Malawi and “Saint Jack” in Singapore, where it was banned for thirty years; Peter Bogdanovich filmed it in 1979. “Picture Palace” won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel in 1978. The novella “Doctor Slaughter” became the 1986 film “Half Moon Street”, with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine, and the stories of “The London Embassy” were made into a British television series in 1987. “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” (1998) is a memoir of his friendship with Naipaul.
Theroux returned to the United States after his first marriage ended and lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod. His sons Marcel and Louis Theroux are both writers and documentary makers. His recent books are the novel “Burma Sahib” (2024), a fictional account of George Orwell’s years as a colonial policeman in Burma, the story collection “The Vanishing Point” (2025) and the travel book “True North: On the Road in Canada” (2026).