This is a collection of short stories – a kind of portraits of the people the author met during his trip to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore. Portraits of living and real people – without embellishment, without fiction or artistic metaphors. Here are residents and tourists, Indian students and Vietnamese millionaires, typical taxi drivers and atypical cafe owners. All those through whose eyes the traveler looks, all those through whose ears he listens.
“These are excerpts from the lives of different people, fragments of our sudden encounters, and sometimes – peeking through a keyhole. Travelers often describe journeys solely through their own lens. But these texts are a small attempt to see the journey through the eyes of other people,” the author says about his book. In his conviction, meetings with ordinary passersby can often tell more about a country than visiting landmarks or museums. You can agree or disagree with Bohdan Logvynenko on this, but after reading this collection of stories, in any case, you will want to forget about all your affairs for at least a short time and go on a journey.
The author himself, by the way, did just that. Once he hitchhiked to Hungary to attend the famous Sziget music festival, and since then he has spent most of his life traveling. Over 28 years, Bohdan Logvynenko has visited more than 50 countries, and in the Southeast Asia region he lived for 2.5 years. In 2016, he launched a new media project Ukraїner (www.ukrainer.net), within which, together with a team of like-minded people, he plans to travel around all 14 historical lands of Ukraine – from Slobozhanshchyna to Podillya, from Volyn to Tavria. The project, partnered by the OKKO network, tells educational stories about remote corners, people, art, and food. Based on the expedition results, it is planned to create modern guidebooks of Ukraine in several languages.
At the same time, Bohdan Logvynenko does not rule out the possibility of new editions in the “Passersby” series. The book about Southeast Asia, which was the first in it, can already be purchased at 34 OKKO gas stations. The collection was prepared by the Lviv publishing house “Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva” and at the last Publishers Forum in Lviv it entered the Top-10 most popular books of VSL in the adult literature segment.
