The defining travel book about the region, published in 1977 and still in print everywhere from Punta Arenas to airport bookshops in Buenos Aires. Chatwin came south to find the source of a scrap of brontosaurus skin his grandmother had owned, and ended up writing a series of short, almost cinematic chapters about the German, Welsh, Scottish and Russian exiles who fetched up at the bottom of the world.
Subsequent scholars have shown that a good deal of In Patagonia is embroidered or invented. It hardly matters — the book gets the mood of the place exactly right, and it is the single text that more travellers to Patagonia have read than any other.