SPIRACLE Audiobooks: A Visit to Don Otavio — Sybille Bedford

In the mid-1940s, Sybille Bedford set off from Grand Central Station for Mexico, accompanied by her friend E., a hamper of food and drink (Virginia ham, cherries, watercress, a flute of bread, Portuguese rosé), books, a writing board, and paper. Her resulting travelogue captures the violent beauty of the country she visited. 

Bedford doesn’t so much describe Mexico as take the reader there—in second-class motor buses over thousands of miles, through arid noons and frigid nights, successions of comida corrida, botched excursions to the coast, conversations recorded verbatim, hilarious observations, and fascinating digressions into murky histories. 

Lydia Leonard’s reading of this audiobook with quick imagination and wry wit, captures Bedford brilliantly.

‘... a book radiant with comedy and colour.’  - Sunday Times

A Spiracle Edition, co-published with Eland Books.