Touch the Dragon

I was startled by the book's immediacy—as if I had been lifted all the way to Thailand without ever booking passage. Touch the Dragon is a splendid evocation of a place and a people that remain, for most of us, in dreams. Few can record such dreams—but Karen Connelly has done so with a precision that suggests the best dreaming can be had by getting on a plane to Bangkok. I already look forward to reading Touch the Dragon again and again. —Timothy Findley

Much more than a travel journal of a year in Thailand, Touch the Dragon gives us the excited and exciting responses of a young, fervent imagination to a landscape, a people and a culture, on which it feeds greedily. Karen Connelly not only illuminates a society, but shows us, through the beauty, energy and humour of her language and imagery, how this strange place touched and changed her, allowing her to receive and understand a rich and common humanity. Wonderful stuff! —Christopher Wiseman

Connelly is a young writer with ancient eyes—the perfect ambassador from a country as new as ours to one as old as Thailand. She is already a promising poet. Now she gives us a prose which is so strong it is transparent, allowing us to see a land and a people as they're meant to be seen. Not from here; from there. Like the best journals, this book becomes the journey itself: one in which we not only touch dragons but also discover that the origin of life is, of all things, starlight. —Ven Begamudre

About the Author

Karen Connelly was seventeen years old when she left Canada for Denchai, a small farming and merchant community in northern Thailand. Her first book, The Small Words in My Body, won the 1990 Pat Lowther Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Touch the Dragon won the 1993 Governor General's Award for he best non-fiction. A native of Calgary, Alberta, she has lived in Thailand, Spain, France and Greece.