Timbuctoo (novel)
First edition cover
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| Author | Tahir Shah |
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| Cover artist | Rachana Shah |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical novel (British Regency era) |
| Publisher | Secretum Mundi Publishing |
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Publication date
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July 5, 2012 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 544 pp. |
| ISBN | |
| Preceded by | Travels With Myself |
| Followed by | Scorpion Soup |
Timbuctoo is the fictional account of the illiterate American sailor Robert Adams' true life journey to Timbuktu, and his arrival in Regency London. The novel is written by Anglo-Afghan author, filmmaker, and adventurer Tahir Shah. It was released on July 5, 2012 by Secretum Mundi Publishing.
The full title of the book is Timbuctoo: Being a singular and most animated account of an illiterate American sailor, taken as a slave in the great Zahara and, after trials and tribulations aplenty, reaching London where he narrated his tale. The story takes place between 1810—when Adams was shipwrecked—and the Spring on 1816, when he set sail for his home in Hudson, New York.
In the early 1990s, while "in the bowels of the London Library", the author, Tahir Shah, says he noticed an old book propping up a water pipe. Surprised that such an old and apparently valuable volume should be being used for this purpose, Shah pulled it down, and read it.
The book was The Narrative of Robert Adams, the tale of an illiterate American sailor who had been shipwrecked on the west coast of Africa at Capo Blanco in 1810. At a time when all the major European powers were eagerly dispatching their best explorers to capture and then sack Timbuktu (among them the likes of Mungo Park and Hugh Clapperton), the only people not searching for the African El Dorado, was the fledgling United States of America. And so it was all the more surprising when an illiterate American sailor was discovered half naked and starving on the streets of London in the winter of 1815, claiming rather nonchalantly, that he had been to Timbuktu. He had been taken there as a white slave, having been captured by Toureg warriors.
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