About Tom Brosnahan

Author, travel writer, photographer, web developer


Tom Brosnahan became a writer in college and submitted his first manuscript (800 pages) to Arthur Frommer in 1969. A month later it was accepted for publication, and Frommer’s Turkey on $5 a Day, the first of his 30+ guidebooks, appeared soon thereafter.


He began writing for the Internet in 2002, and his travel websites have now received millions of visitors from 230+ countries.


Guidebooks were his passion, but his humorous travel memoir, Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong Tea (2005) taught him how to construct a narrative. He was ready for a different kind of writing.

 

On a visit to Istanbul in 2016, standing in Sultanahmet Square, he imagined what it had been like in 1968 when he first saw it—a sleepy, untouristy historical park surrounded by hippy microbuses. The mental picture came to life, characters appeared and began to act, and he wrote it all down. Two weeks later when he left Istanbul, he had 30,000 words of a novel. That first novel, Istanbul Love Bus & the A-Bomb Surprise, now 75,000 words, will be published early in 2018.


His first published novel, Paris Girls Secret Society, started out as a sequel to Istanbul Love Bus & the A-Bomb Surprise, but from the outset the characters who appeared were entirely different and the story even more exciting—so he decided to publish his second novel first.

 

The characters of the third novel, tentatively entitled Alexandros, have already appeared and he’s chronicling their adventures right now. Watch for more!

 

Born and raised in Pennsylvania USA, Tom Brosnahan joined the US Peace Corps after graduating from Tufts University in 1967, and went to Turkey to teach English. During his Peace Corps service he learned to speak Turkish and discovered a fascinating land virtually unknown to most travelers. That first guidebook of his, Turkey on $5 a Day, was written as a very successful Peace Corps project. 

After graduate school and a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship for research in the archives of the Ottoman Empire, Tom devoted himself to writing and photography.

 

His guidebooks for InsightBerlitzFrommer's and Lonely Planet covered Belize, Canada, Egypt, England, France, Guatemala, Israel, Mexico, Morocco, New England, Tunisia and Turkey, with translations into more than ten languages.

Tom has served as a Contributing Editor to Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine, has had many articles and photographs published in leading magazines and newspapers and has appeared on television and radio, including ABC's Good Morning America, NPR's Talk of the Nation, the Travel Channel and Public Radio International's The Connection. He has given lectures at the American Turkish Council's annual conference, the Smithsonian Institution, the Cooper-Hewitt National Musem of Design, and other organizations. His travel-planning websites have received as many as seven million annual visitors from 230+ countries.


Istanbul Love Bus & the A-Bomb Surprise, a novel by Tom Brosnahan