A New York Times Notable Book

"In an era of jet tourism, Jonathan Raban] remains a
traveler-adventurer in the tradition of . . . Robert Louis Stevenson."
--The New York Times Book Review

In 1782 an immigrant with the high-toned name J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur--"Heartbreak" in English--wrote a pioneering account of one European's transformation into an American. Some two hundred years later Jonathan Raban, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, arrived in Crevecoeur's wake to see how America has paid off for succeeding generations of newcomers. The result is...

Moving, exquisitely written and hugely entertaining, Waxwings captures the landscape and life of contemporary America, confirming Jonathan Raban as one of our very finest writers

The Inside Passage to Alaska, with its outer fringes and entailments, is a very complicated sea-route. Parts of it are open ocean, parts of it no wider than a modest river, and it has been in continuous use for several thousand years. Its aboriginal past - still tantalizingly close to hand - puts the inside passaged on terms of close kinship with the ancient sea of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. This book is much more than a book about a sea voyage; it is about Jonathan Raban's journey home to his father who is dying; about his crumbling relationship with his wife and also about the...

"His memories flow as naturally as his writing. . . . The reader is transported back to the day when a six-year-old stepped from the train into a new life."--Smithsonian

As a grown man, Percy Wollaston almost never spoke of the homestead where he grew up--until, in 1972, nearing the age of 70, he wrote this book about his childhood years.

Lured by the government's promise of land and the promotional literature of the railroads, six-year-old Percy Wollaston's family left behind their home in North Dakota in 1909, heading West to "take up a claim." They settled near Ismay,...

One of the classics of travel writing, this is a prescient exploration of the individual's relationship with urban living

First published in 1981, Old Glory tells of a journey down the Mississippi in an open-topped boat. No one who has read this book can possibly complain about being surprised by Trump s election victory. Thirty years later we see it as not just wry, funny, brave, immersed and beautifully observed but prophetic. A book to be read and re-read.