A warm, mischievous and reflective book about how a life becomes a story—and how a story can change its listener.
Set across Vondelpark, the sea, West Africa and a lifetime of distant roads.
On a bench in Amsterdam's Vondelpark, an old sailor called Bart begins telling a stranger about Billy—and cannot stop. His stories roam from rough harbour bars and three-masted ships to West Africa, business ventures and improbable encounters, gradually revealing the price as well as the exhilaration of a life spent moving.
Bart looks as though the sea has carved its history into his face. Beside him sits Harry, a quieter man whose world has grown small. Their accidental meeting creates the frame for a succession of tales that are funny, dangerous, worldly and sometimes difficult to believe.
Inside the story
The stories range across ships, ports, timber operations, African markets, rivers, horses, fortunes and failures. Yet the book is less a catalogue of destinations than a portrait of appetite: the desire to move, try, acquire, love and begin again.
As Bart's performance unfolds, Harry—and the reader—must decide what is confession, what is embellishment and why the distinction may matter less than the generosity of the telling.
Watch a scene
A sailor learns—or drifts
A 30-second cinematic interpretation of Bart's storytelling: a quiet Vondelpark bench gives way to the tropical night when his younger self must bring a stranded passenger boat's dying engine back to life.
“To roam the roads of lands remote: to travel is to live.”
From The Globetrotter
The world of the book
Vondelpark, the sea, West Africa and a lifetime of distant roads
What draws you in
↗ A born storyteller on a park bench
↗ Adventures spanning oceans and continents
↗ Humour balanced by loss and reflection
At its heart
◆ Travel
◆ Memory
◆ Risk & regret
Own the story
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