Going astray abroad

These days we are all sophisticates, or so we like to think. Thanks to the media and the internet we can become worldly without leaving home. What’s more, if we stay at home our theoretical broad-mindedness is never put to the test; we can express hip views and appear open to cultural differences whilst remaining comfortable by the fireside. So, asks Matthew Kneale, what happens to that kind of shallow sophistication when it finds itself on foreign ground? What happens to a smug moral code removed from its context?

In these 12 short stories Kneale demonstrates the convenient elasticity of moral values. A middle-class English family, trying to be adventurous, travels to a remote corner of China and falls victim not to foreignness but to its own prejudice, with shocking consequences. A dull American discovers that in a trackless corner of central Asia he can be the man of a girl’s dreams, rather than the featureless failure he is at home.