Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, strange, humorous, and melancholy, and thirty years of mutual history, this is a very personal account of how one develops as a writer, how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life, and what constitutes the relationship of mentor and student. Told with Theroux's impeccable eye for place and setting and his novelistic instinct for character and incident, Sir Vidia's Shadow recalls Nicholson Baker's U and I: A True Story and Rainer Maria Rilke's classic Letters to a Young Poet.