Non-fiction: The Last Train to Zona Verde

Journey and Structure
Paul Theroux sets out across Africa with a clear, almost nostalgic mission: to travel by the remaining long-distance trains that stitch parts of the continent together. The route is episodic rather than linear, composed of separate rail journeys, freight-hauls and broken stretches of track that become the connective tissue of a larger portrait. Nights on rickety sleeper cars, waits at bleak stations, and long daytime views from carriage windows serve as the book's steady narrative engine, carrying the reader through deserts, savannahs and collapsing colonial infrastructure.
The travel episodes alternate between close, often funny vignettes of fellow passengers and sober sequences of stalled trains and indifferent bureaucracy. Encounters with porters, officials and border guards illuminate daily life while Theroux's own reactions provide a personal frame. The "last train" motif is both literal and symbolic: an attempt to witness what remains of an older, rail-centered Africa and to measure how much of that world is disappearing or being repurposed.

Themes and Observations
A dominant theme is decline and resilience. Elsewhere-made railways, built for extraction and control, are now unevenly maintained and underused, yet they still carry stories and livelihoods. Theroux probes the legacy of colonial engineering and the ways modern states neglect or sometimes cannibalize those lines. He pays attention to the paradoxes of development, projects sponsored by aid agencies, private investment in extractive industries, flashy new roads and airports, alongside the stubborn, everyday economies that keep trains running.
Humanity and politics run through the book as much as rails. Conversations on board yield portraits of migration, hope, cynicism and endurance. Theroux's gaze is often critical of governments, NGOs and Western interventions, and he is equally skeptical of easy romanticization. He highlights corruption, mismanagement and the human cost of conflict, yet he also records generous hospitality, humor and the improvisational ways people navigate failing systems. The result is a portrait that balances lament for loss with recognition of survival.

Style and Tone
Theroux writes with keen observational detail and a mordant, conversational voice. Description is vivid, soundscapes of stations, the feel of carriage benches, the dust and heat of border towns, and dialogue is rendered with an ear for character. His prose moves between lyrical passages and sharp, often acerbic commentary; the book's mood is at once elegiac and trenchant, driven by curiosity rather than sentimentality.
Readers can expect a travelogue that is both reportage and meditation. Theroux's impressions are subjective and occasionally provocative, and he does not shy away from controversial judgments. The narrative rewards those interested in infrastructure, history and the underreported realities of everyday life on a changing continent, offering a book that is as much about how places are connected as it is about what those connections reveal about past and future.