Following in the footsteps of countless emigrants, Jonathan Raban takes ship for New York from Liverpool, to explore how succeeding generations of newcomers have fared in America. He finds a country of massive contrasts, between the 'Street People' and the 'Air People' in New York, between small town and big city, between thrusting immigrants and down-at-heel Native Americans.Having outgrown his minute, rented, New York apartment, he heads for Guntersville, Alabama, where he settle...

Navigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, Jonathan Raban opens himself to experience the river in all her turbulent and unpredictable old glory. Going wherever the current takes him, he joins a coon-hunt in Savana, falls for a girl in St Louis, worships with black Baptists in Memphis and hangs out with the housewives of Pemiscot and the hog-king of Dubuque. Through tears of laughter, we are led into the heartland of America – with its hunger and hospitality, its inv...

Coasting round Britain single-handed in an antique two-masted sailing boat, Jonathan Raban conducts a masterly exploration of England and the English at the time of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. He moves seamlessly between awkward memories of childhood as the son of a vicar, a vivid chronicle of the shape-shifting sea and incisive descriptions of the people and communities he encounters.As he faces his terror of racing water, eddies, offshore sandbars and ferries on a co...

This collection of writing, undertaken for love and for money, is largely about books, writers and travel. It is an engrossing and candid exploration of what it means to make a living from words. Jonathan Raban weighs up the advantages of maintaining an independent spirit against problems of insolvency and self-worth, confesses to travel as an escape from the blank page, ponders the true art of the book review, admires the role of the literary editor and remembers with affection and hilari...

Intrigued by the Arabs, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks, who began holidaying in London after the 1970s oil boom, Raban wanted to discover the reality of their home lives and world view. His quest took him through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. What he discovered was a far cry from the camel, tent and sand-dune archetypes of early European explorers. Oil wealth had seeped into almost every corner, and Bedouin encampments had been replaced by cosmopolitan boo...

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...

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...

Driving Home is a collection of Jonathan Raban's travel writing and essays, spanning two decades and charting its course through American history and world events.Jonathan Raban has written about people and places in transition or on the margins, of journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached; of isolation and alienation, but also of what it means to belong, to feel rooted.He writes with an outsider’s eye for the public and the persona...

At the turn of the millennium, two immigrants are drawn to the United States by their own versions of the American Dream.For Tom Janeway - a Hungarian-born English intellectual most at home with his books - it's the family he thought he'd never have. For Chick - an illegal alien newly escaped from a cargo container - it's the land of plenty he imagined back in China.But as the stock market hits a new high, anti-globalist riots break out in the streets, a terrorist is arrest...

'A beautiful, compelling memoir . . . This, Raban's final work, is a gorgeous achievement" – Ian McEwanOn 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body. Learning to use a wheelchair in a rehab facility outside Seattle and resisting the ministrations of the nurses overseeing his recovery, Raban began to reflect upon the measure of his own life in the face of his ow...

An entrancing travelogue from celebrated writer, Jonathan Raban.First published in 1999, Passage to Juneau is an account of Raban's personal journey from Seattle to the Alaskan Capital by boat through the meandering sea route, the Inside Passage, told in parallel to the same voyage taken by Captain George Vancouver in the late eighteenth century.Described by Ian McEwan as 'Raban at his best', this is extraordinary travel writing, told from two very...

An entrancing travelogue from celebrated writer, Jonathan Raban.First published in 1999, Passage to Juneau is an account of Raban's personal journey from Seattle to the Alaskan Capital by boat through the meandering sea route, the Inside Passage, told in parallel to the same voyage taken by Captain George Vancouver in the late eighteenth century.Described by Ian McEwan as 'Raban at his best', this is extraordinary travel writing, told from two very...