Penguin Classics - The Apprentice Tourist

I am delighted to present my first ever book cover illustration for Penguin Classics - ‘The Apprentice Tourist’.

For many reasons this project was just so exciting for me. I have always wanted to illustrate book covers and this felt particularly compelling because I got to use the photographs taken on Mário’s journey in 1927. The story promises to be an eye-opening and challenging account of a man traveling through such a mysterious and beautiful part of the world in the early 20th century.

This is the first time the travelogue of Mário de Andrade has been translated into English.

“My life’s done a somersault,” wrote Mário de Andrade in a letter, on the verge of taking a leap. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, and almost fifty years before Bruce Chatwin ventured into one of the most remote regions of South America in In Patagonia, Andrade, the queer mixed-race “pope” of Brazilian modernism and author of the epic novel Macunaíma, finally embarks on a three-month steamboat voyage up the great river and into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world. Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, and featuring more than a dozen photographs, The Apprentice Tourist not only offers an awed and awe-inspiring fish-out-of-water account of the Indigenous peoples and now-endangered landscapes of Brazil that he encounters (and, comically, sometimes fails to reach), but also traces his internal metamorphosis: The trip prompts him to rethink his ingrained Eurocentrism, challenges his received narratives about the Amazon, and alters the way he understands his motherland and the vast diversity of cultures found within it.