"After Lights out for The Territory, a man sent me an X ray of his brain tumour. He'd superimposed it over a map of London and was trying to heal himself by walking out its routes through the city."

Iain Sinclair's dense and feverish explorations of London have made him one of Britain's most respected authors. From the word storms of White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings, which interweaves dark tales of the contemporary book trade with channelled glimpses of the Ripper murders, to the all-encompassing, microscopic sprawl of the essays in Lights Out For the Territory, Sinclair's vision is unique. For his latest book, Landor's Tower, Sinclair has gone West, to Wales, incorporating Alfred Watkins, Arthur Machen and the 25 unsolved defence industry 'suicides' of the early 1980s.