Atlas Greaves was the kind of child who read atlases under the covers and the kind of adult who never grew out of it. He left home young, with a notebook and not much else, and has spent the thirty years since walking the world's countries one at a time - sleeping on night trains, eating whatever the next table is eating, and asking far too many questions of people too courteous to send him away.He has been soaked by monsoons and buried by snow, talked his way across closed borders and waited out coups in bus stations. But the moments he writes down are smaller than that: the colour of evening light on a wall, the joke a conductor makes, the way a country reveals itself in how it queues for a train. He believes the land comes first and explains nearly everything that follows - the history, the food, the temperament of a people - and he writes to make a reader feel they have travelled, not merely revised.The Far Countries is the result: an unhurried, book-by-book journey through every nation on earth, told in the warm, clear-eyed voice of someone who has actually been there. Greaves keeps no permanent home. Wherever the next book is, that's where he lives.