Eclectic crime fiction & informed, irreverent non-fiction from Asia & beyond
wildwritinglife reviews The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu! …Beyond the very loaded action line, which appeals to the action-thirsty reader, The Devil´s Road to Kathmandu by the author and journalist Tom Vater has very fine human observations and a well-tempered timeline. The idea of coming back and forth from a period of time to another is a frequent […]
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The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu is out in a new paperback edition with Next Chapter. ‘The Devil’s Road To Kathmandu’ is a tense, fast paced and kaleidoscopic pulp thriller, following the lives of two generations of drifters who become embroiled in a saga of sex, drugs and murder on the road between London and the […]
Continue ReadingA brand new and very kind review of my first novel, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, at The Dorset Book Detective. Thanks! A snappy thriller with strong characterisation and witty dialogue, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu is an entertaining read with as many plot twists as it has droll one liners. Tom Vater’s novel […]
Continue ReadingBetween 1995 and 2004 I recorded several hundred hours of music and sounds from Asia for The British Library’s National Sound Archive – material from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, The Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, India and Nepal. I recorded mostly the music of minorities and musicians in remote rural locations. I released several CD collections of […]
Continue ReadingHmong Lao Khaen player in Vientiane 2001 The British Library holds a small but significant collection of Lao material, consisting of manuscripts, rare printed books, periodicals and post cards, mainly acquired after 1973. However, the oldest items in Lao language date back to the 19th century. The earliest book about Laos is in Italian and […]
Continue Reading“There are plenty of unique, crazy and offbeat characters that fill this novel, and the author has a keen eye for detail. The part of this story that took place in the Blue Parrot is one of my favorites, and is an excellent example of how the author sets a scene that sucks the reader […]
Continue ReadingIn 1998 I traveled from Kathmandu to Istanbul overland. At the time I was recording indigenous music across Asia in collaboration with The British Library’s National Sound Archive/International Music Collection. I recorded street musicians, folk musicians, religious performers and street corner drunks. I worked in Nepal, India, The Philippines, Thailand, Iran and Pakistan. In Pakistan, […]
Continue ReadingI have been interviewed about my first novel, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, out now with Crime Wave Press, on Pat Bertram’s literary blog.
Continue ReadingFirst published in 2006, this new edition of The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, my first novel, has been called a better backpacker novel than The Beach by The Bangkok Post and is now available as a Kindle ebook on amazon UK, published by Crime Wave Press. What’s inside: In 1976, four friends, Dan, Fred, Tim […]
Continue ReadingTom Vaters erster Roman, ‘The Devil’s Road To Kathmandu’, ist 2006 in Hong Kong bei Dragon’s Mouth Press einem Imprint von Orchid Books auf Englisch erschienen. When Dan, Tim and Fred, three naive hippies, set off from London to Kathmandu with few funds and a dodgy bus, a drug deal in Pakistan seems like the most common sense […]
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