Quick Take
- Narration: Liam Gerrard is an excellent match for Adam Fletcher’s dry British register, he captures the self-deprecating wit without turning it into a comedy performance, which is exactly the right calibration.
- Themes: Off-the-beaten-track travel, geopolitical absurdity, relationships under stress
- Mood: Genuinely funny with unexpected moments of pathos; lighter than it sounds
- Verdict: Fletcher’s quest to visit the world’s strangest places is consistently entertaining and occasionally illuminating, Liam Gerrard’s narration makes it one of the more enjoyable travel memoirs currently in audio.
Someone tear-gassed Adam Fletcher in Istanbul. This was supposed to be a normal city break. It was not. And out of that thoroughly unexpected tear-gassing grew a quest to visit ten of the world’s strangest, most inadvisable, most everyone-is-trying-to-escape-from locations, Chernobyl, North Korea, Liberland (a self-declared country the size of a field on the Croatian-Serbian border), Transnistria, and several more places that do not normally feature on travel influencer itineraries.
Don’t Go There, the first entry in what became the Adam’s Adventures series, is the audiobook equivalent of being stuck next to a very funny, very bald travel writer on a long flight and finding the hours disappearing. Fletcher is a self-described couch potato who lives in Berlin with his German girlfriend Annett, and the two of them navigate these inadvisable destinations together until Fletcher manages to sufficiently irritate Annett that she declines to continue, at which point he continues alone. This relationship dynamic, the patient, sharp-tongued German girlfriend and the chaos-prone British writer, gives the book a human throughline that keeps it from becoming a mere list of strange places.
Our Take on Don’t Go There
The Chernobyl and North Korea chapters are the ones reviewers consistently single out, and they are the best material in the book. Posing as a scientist to sneak into Chernobyl is a good sentence on its own; Fletcher’s account of what he found there, the ghost city of Pripyat, the strange tourism ecosystem that has grown up around the disaster zone, is both funny and genuinely eerie. The North Korean water park chapter is even stronger: the almost-surreal experience of being an Englishman in a workers’ paradise, following rules that do not quite make sense and trying not to be conspicuous while being extremely conspicuous, is exactly the kind of absurdist comedy that travel writing at its best produces. One reviewer described it as thinking Dave Barry meets Rick Steves, which captures the tonal balance well.
Why Listen to Don’t Go There
Liam Gerrard’s narration is a genuine asset. The book is written in Fletcher’s voice, which is dry, precise, and calibrated to a particular kind of British understatement, and Gerrard does not oversell it. He lets the jokes land at the pace the writing sets, which requires restraint, you can hear a narrator oversell this kind of material by half a beat and the comedy collapses. Gerrard does not make that mistake. The Annett sections, where Fletcher is rendering his girlfriend’s witty and articulate responses to his decisions, are the most difficult to narrate convincingly, and several reviewers noted that Annett’s dialogue seems almost too polished. Whether that is embellishment or genuine is left productively unclear.
What to Watch For in Don’t Go There
The book is funnier about some destinations than others. Moldova and the Hare Krishna camp in Argentina are the weaker chapters, interesting in concept, but the material does not quite produce the comic density that Chernobyl and Pyongyang do. The Liberland chapter, about the pursuit of a disputed micro-nation via Croatian police-boat chase, is somewhere in between: a great story with a slightly deflating resolution. Listeners should also note that this is travel humor, not travel journalism. Fletcher is not reporting from these places with any ambition toward comprehensive account, he is a tourist who happens to be unusually self-aware and unusually willing to look foolish, and the book is best enjoyed in that spirit.
Who Should Listen to Don’t Go There
An easy recommendation for anyone who has bounced off travel memoirs that take themselves too seriously, or who wants the kind of armchair adventure that makes the listener glad to be armchair. Fletcher is warm about the people he meets in these places, he does not treat residents of North Korea or Transnistria as props for his comedy, which is a meaningful distinction from lesser travel humor. Listeners who have enjoyed Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island, Jon Ronson’s early work, or David Sedaris’s travel essays will find the register familiar and welcoming. Less suited to listeners wanting cultural depth or political analysis, this is entertainment first, insight second, and it is honest about that ordering.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Fletcher have meaningful access to North Korea, or is the chapter the typical tourist circuit experience?
Based on the synopsis and reviews, it is the standard guided tourist circuit, Fletcher is not a journalist with special access. The comedy and observation come from his perspective as an obviously bewildered Westerner navigating a carefully managed experience.
How did Liam Gerrard handle the German girlfriend Annett’s dialogue, given that several reviewers found it almost too articulate?
Gerrard renders Annett’s lines with the same dry register as the rest of the narrative, which works given that her wit is presented as genuinely matching Fletcher’s. Whether this feels authentic or polished depends on individual listener tolerance for the conceit.
Is Don’t Go There the first book in the Adam’s Adventures series, and does it need to be read first?
Yes, it is the first installment. Each book appears to cover a separate set of destinations, so they function as standalone volumes, but starting here establishes the characters and tone that carry through the series.
Does the book address what happened to Annett and Adam’s relationship after she declined to continue the adventures?
The synopsis suggests she drops out partway through the ten destinations, after which Fletcher continues solo. Whether the relationship resolves within this volume or across the series is not specified in available metadata.
