The plan was to take a year navigating Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, in search of life, love, and purpose. It took nine years.
Flying with the Cormorants is a genre bending work that is all memoir, but with a generous helping of fiction and a whole lot of travel.
Mark Manoukian, a second-generation Armenian immigrant, lives in London. Contrary to the naysayers telling him to stay, he decides on a year in Southeast Asia, China, and Japan to search for a new life, love, and purpose. He ditches his two-hour commute from a soot stained sublet in South London and sets off instead for Bangkok, where he meets con artists, mercenaries, an ex-drug lord, and several mosquito-ravaged backpackers. And the search takes nine years.
Set in the 80s and 90s, against a backdrop of great societal change this coming of age story paints the reasons we travel and includes elements of conflict, tragedy, hope, and romcom as our protagonist descends from fulfilling his dreams with the purest motives, into a hedonistic decline.
Like the cormorant used by the Ukai fishermen, will he be destined to catch the fish but not eat it or can he find redemption?
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William M ChristieMel Christie