Passage by Colin Thubron review – mortality and memory in a gem of a novel

A terminally ill woman makes a final trip to Egypt in an exquisitely wrought portrait of end-of-life reckoning Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch that it is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. In the shallow and infantilising age through which we are living, Colin Thubron dares to assume that his readers are adults. Passage is a very beautiful, very moving, authentic work of art. Hardly more than a novella, it sits lightly in the hand, but its emotional and aesthetic weight overtips the balance. Thubron began his career as a travel writer and a large part of the act

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