Frances Letters
Author of
The Surprising Asians
and
People of Shiva
BOOKS and REVIEWS
The Surprising Asians:
A Vietnam War-era hitch-hike around South-East Asia
Angus & Robertson (1968)
The Surprising Asians was a set text for NSW School Certificate English in the 1960s and 1970s. It was studied by some quarter of a million students, and sold more than 40,000 copies.
In 1966, but for the fact that the Vietnam war was in full swing, most Australians knew nothing about Asia. I'd never met anyone who'd been there. With our old lurking fear of "The Yellow Peril", we took it for granted that our Anglo-Saxon wariness and disdain was normal, and justified.
Far from being the inscrutable orientals of Australia's imagination at the time, the ordinary people I met in cities and remote villages proved to be extraordinary in their kindness and humanity. And apart from that, completely normal.
ABC Radio National
The Hindsight program Asia overland--adventures on the hippie trail quoted extensively from the book, citing it as a trigger for many young Australians' discovery of Asia.
With what The Age described as "a kind of fresh, unbiased and often hilarious wonder which is freely transmitted to the reader", the book describes one naive and ignorant young Australian's year hitch-hiking round Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and wartime South Vietnam.
The Surprising Asians REVIEWS
"Adventurous travellers from 40 years ago kick-started a love-affair with Asia that's endured and grown with subsequent generations of travelling Australians. Frances Letters...who set out to travel and hitch-hike round South-East Asia, wanted to see for herself what was happening in Vietnam.
And she made it happen. She went through Laos and Cambodia, and all the way into Vietnam, during the peak of the war––frequently into danger zones."
Australian Book Review
In September 2013 Nick Hordern wrote:
"This reviewer's own introduction to the debate [about Australia's place in the Asian region] was Frances Letters's The Surprising Asians, a book of youthful travels notably warm in its advocacy of the Asian perspective.
"Incidentally, The Surprising Asians stands as a useful corrective to the tendency to credit the rise of Asia awareness in Australia to the Hawke and Keating governments.
And not only was Letters's book published in 1968, at a time when Australian troops were taking heavy casualties in Vietnam; it was also chosen as a set text for secondary schools by a conservative New South Wales government whose premier, when confronted with a group of anti-war protestors, had ordered his driver to 'drive over the bastards.'"
The Northern Star
"My love affair with the gentle art of armchair travel began in high school when one of our prescribed texts was The Surprising Asians, by Frances Letters.
"A fascinating book on an Australian girl's hitchhike through Vietnam War-era Southeast Asia, it opened a door into a fascinating and alien world for this 15-year-old schoolgirl."
The Australian
"The first impression, and one that is sustained to the last page of People of Shiva, is that Frances Letters is a unique and extraordinary person.
"It is not an impression that she is at any pains to give. She simply tells how she spent nine months in India at the poverty level, and does it with fine writing and self-accepting honesty…
"She has a true egalitarianism, a poet's eye, a social psychologist's ear, and a degree of selflessness that would do credit to any saddhu, any searcher for spiritual truth."
People of Shiva: Encounters in India
Angus & Robertson (1971)
Now available as an ebook from:
Amazon : http://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B01B5CXHNS?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Google : https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Frances_Letters_People_of_Shiva?id=p9FxCwAAQBAJ
Apple : https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1078120505
Kobo : https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/people-of-shiva
People of Shiva REVIEWS
The Sydney Morning Herald
"This is no dry travelogue written after a day’s stay in the most popular places,"
“There is so much information couched in absorbing and adventurous stories [told with] intelligent understanding."
"It’s a book which is difficult to put down...
"This is one of those times when the blurb on the jacket is right. Frances Letters is one of those rare travellers who can make us see a whole country in the grains of its daily sand, the inner life of a people in their simplest outward acts.
"In this way she has written a most uncommon book about India."
The Observer
"It would be a pity if this book by an Australian woman traveller were lost in the throng; it is not just another bird's-eye view of Indian squalor and enigmas.
"Miss Letters is prepared to live rough, travel light, think hard. The human experiences she accumulated at ground level were authentic, illuminating and, in one shameful incident in Goa, enough to make all but the most determined and tolerant young person shake off the dust of India forever.'
The Times Literary Supplement
"Her shrewd observation, her gift of description, and her warm humanity make this book most enjoyable."
The Bulletin
"The compassionate Miss Letters steeps the reader in the enigma that is India so fully that this is a book which anyone aspiring to appreciation of modern India should read."
Nation Review
"This is one of the most arresting books I have read on that fearsome and deeply troubled country. Miss Letters takes V.S. Naipaul's classic, An Area of Darkness-- the simple and frustrating story of a West Indian-born Indian's attempt to return to a homeland he has never seen nor known-- as her bible.
In some areas of sheer powerful description she surpasses Naipaul…
Like Naipaul she notes and observes, she does not attempt to write a disinterested account; hers is a very moving and personal experience...
'A compelling journey, compellingly told."
Drawings by Frances Letters from The Surprising Asians and People of Shiva.
Country Life
"Lyrical, exasperated, always full of wonder and concern for humanity, [the book] forces us to re-examine our preconceptions of a nation whose future could shape the world's."
