The Travelling Companion: For as Long as it Takes to Get There

By Ian Rankin

For recent college graduate Ronald Hastie, a job at the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop offers the perfect occupation during a summer abroad in Paris. Working part-time in exchange for room and board leaves plenty of freedom to explore the city once visited by his literary hero, Robert Louis Stevenson, and things only get better when he meets a collector who claims to have the original manuscripts of both the first draft of Jekyll and Hyde and the never-published The Travelling Companion (both thought to have been destroyed).

Then Ron meets the man's mysterious assistant, and a reckless obsession stirs inside him. As the life he knew back home in Scotland fades from memory, he desperately seeks the secret lying within Stevenson's long-lost pages...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784979997

Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin is the worldwide #1 bestselling writer of the Inspector Rebus books, including Knots and Crosses, Hide and Seek, Let It Bleed, Black and Blue, Set in Darkness, Resurrection Men, A Question of Blood, The Falls and Exit Music. He is also the author of The Complaints and Doors Open.  He has won an Edgar Award, a Gold Dagger for fiction, a Diamond Dagger for career excellence, and the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his contributions to literature. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife and their two sons.

Reviews for The Travelling Companion

[grandpahobo_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent story.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Fans of Ian Rankin will be aware of his own fascination with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, echoes of which are found throughout his crime novels featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus. This short story gives further vent to that preoccupation, revolving around the experiences of Ronald Hastie, a student of English from Edinburgh who takes up the offer of a vacation job working in an antiquarian bookshop in Paris. While there Hastie meets another bookseller who shows him a manuscript which appears to be an early version of Stevenson’s classic, ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Meanwhile the hitherto clean living, almost demure, Hastie finds himself undergoing a range of new experiences, some of them with drastic consequences.I was actually a little disappointed with this story – it wasn’t bad but somehow I expected something a little more polished from Rankin. This seemed more like a brief outline of a potential novel rather than a finished story.