Somebody Else

In 1880 a taciturn young Frenchman arrives at the Yemeni port of Aden, where he finds work as a foreman in a coffee warehouse. He is the poet and enfant terrible Arthur Rimbaud, author of A Season in Hell – a notorious figure in France but now, at the age of twenty five, determined to start a new life. In this atmospheric study of Rimbaud's 'lost years', Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of his life as a trader, explorer and gun-runner in East Africa. We follow his trail in Somal