Will Self & Quentin Blake: Moonlight Travellers

Hardcover | 16 x 1.78 x 20.83 cm | 112 pp

Thames & Hudson | 2019 | 9780500022733

These watercolour journeys through unknown landscapes capture, with unmatched skill, all the mystery and intrigue of the dead of night. A unique collaboration, this book brings Blake’s macabre wit into dialogue with the imaginative insight of Will Self.

‘The moon drives everyone mad – you know that, well enough. But this is no lycanthropic or otherwise spooky metamorphosis: it’s far stranger than that…’ When Quentin Blake embarked on creating a set of new drawings on fantasies of travel, even he had not envisaged a series so sombre, so haunting, as Moonlight Travellers.

With characteristic sharpness, Self mingles fiction, fact and flights of memory to transport the reader on a radical tour of Blake’s mysterious lands. Moonlight Travellers sees two creative minds at the height of their powers connect word and image, darkness and light with our deepest sensibilities. In eight-wheeled contraptions and winged machines, they carry us on a trail of dreamlike journeys. After all, ‘there’s nothing more prosaic – at least, at this end of human history – than a car journey.’