A collection of travel writing by some of the genre's finest authors, from Paul Theroux to Sara Wheeler, voyaging from Mississippi to Malawi and Thailand.The New Granta Book of Travel Writing represents a sea change in writers' approaches to the craft. The 1980s were the culmination of a golden age, when writers including Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West. • "As good a book as I have read about rural America in a very long time." —The New York Times Book ReviewIn 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bol...

Spanning two decades, this frank, witty, and provocative volume—part essay collection, part diary—charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by “one of our most gifted observers” (Newsday).For more than thirty years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an En...

**The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land takes us along the Inside Passage, 1,000 miles of often treacherous water, which he navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat, offering captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss."A work of great beauty and inexhaustible fervor." —The Washington Post Book World**With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and ency...

For more than thirty years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an expat, about what it means to feel rooted in America. Spanning two decades, Driving Home charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by "a super-sensitive, all-seeing eye. Proving that an outsider is the keenest obser...

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A poignant memoir of love, trauma, and recovery after a life-changing stroke, twinned to a powerful account of his father's experience in World War II, by a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.“A beautiful, compelling memoir...Raban’s final work is a gorgeous achievement.” —Ian McEwan, New York Times best-selling author of LessonsI...

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land comes a novel that is “as atmospheric with vague menace as a Hitchcock thriller” (The New York Review of Books).In the not-too-distant future, no one trusts anyone and everyone is watching everybody else. America is obsessed with information and under siege from an insidious enemy: paranoia. National identity cards are mandatory, terrorism alerts are a daily event, and privacy is laid bare on ...

One of the most witty and idiosyncratic travel books, Eothen started out as a few notes scribbled on the back of a map for a friend, but took Kinglake seven years of painstaking work to finesse. The physical details of the journey, undertaken in 1834 through Turkey, Cyprus, the Holy Land, Cairo and Damascus, are barely mentioned. The infectious charm lies in the conversations, the whimsical chance encounters and the attitudes of the author. Over the years, Kinglake has been recogn...

**From the bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land comes a powerful novel set in Seattle in 1999, a city troubled by rioting anarchists, vanishing children, and the discovery of an al-Qaeda operative.“A tour de force.” —The Washington Post Book World**Jonathan Raban’s powerful novel is set in Seattle at the height of its infatuation with the virtual. It’s a place that attracts immigrants. One of these is Tom Janeway, a bookish Hungarian-born Englishm...

Put Jonathan Raban on a boat and the results will be fascinating, and never more so than when he’s sailing around the serpentine, two-thousand-mile coast of his native England. In this acutely perceived and beautifully written book, the bestselling author of Bad Land turns that voyage—which coincided with the Falklands war of 1982—into an occasion for meditations on his country, his childhood, and the elusive notion of home.Whether he’s chatting with bored tax exiles on th...

Seduced by the government’s offer of 320 acres per homesteader, Americans and Europeans rushed to Montana and the Dakotas to fulfill their own American dream in the first decade of the twentieth century.Jonathan Raban’s stunning evocation of the harrowing, desperate reality behind the homesteader’s dreams strips away the myth—while preserving the romance—that has shrouded our understanding of our own heartland.

The author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a spartan sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing.In the course of his voyage, Raban records the mercurial caprices of the river and the astonishingly varied lives of the people who live along its banks. Whether he is fishing for walleye or hunting coon, discussing theology in Prairie Du Chien or race relations in...