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 Memphis, he is an expert observer of the heartyland's estrangement from America's capitals ot power and culture, and its...

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...

From Jonathan Raban, the award--winning author of Bad Land and Passage to Juneau, comes this quirky and insightful story of what can happen when one can and does go home again.
For the past thirty years, George Grey has been a ship bunker in the fictional west African nation of Montedor, but now he's returning home to England-to a daughter who's a famous author he barely knows, to a peculiar new friend who back in the sixties was one of England's more famous singers, and to the long and empty days of retirement during which he's easy prey to the melancholy of memories, all the more acute...

A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the Year
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
Winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award

"No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror. "
--Washington Post Book World
In 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 bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures,...

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.