GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar, by Paul Theroux. Hamish Hamilton, 2008, 496 pp., £20 (cloth)

Books about traveling in other people's footsteps are commonplace. We have Lesley Downer's "On the Road to the Deep North" and Patrick Symmes' motorbike journey through South America, "Chasing Che," just to name two. To travel in your own footsteps rather than the journeys of the dead is rare, but this is precisely what Paul Theroux does in his new book. At the age of 66, 33 years after undertaking the journey that led to his travelogue "The Great Railway Bazaar," he boards a train in London, disembarks in Japan and returns on the Trans-Siberian railway.

Theroux is happy to travel in hard-seat class carriages, share his space with strangers, and grub for food along the line, knowing that, as he puts it, "Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world." In this respect Theroux is like Robert L. Stevenson, choosing the flint-covered road because he knows there are dividends for a writer in the bruising business of rubbing up against the world.

In Eastern Europe he finds fleapit cities with lines of people traveling to the West for work. As he moves further East the contrasts become starker: the glistening railway lines of Western Europe, the buckled, arthritic rolling stock of Central Asia.