Jonathan Raban

The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing. 
"Stunning." —The New York Times Book Review

In the course of his voyage, Raban records the mercurial caprices of the river and the astonishingly varied lives of the people who...

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 Review

In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert.  But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad...

"In June 2011, just days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban was sitting down to dinner with his daughter when he found he couldn't move his knife to his plate. Later that night, at the hospital, doctors confirmed what all had suspected: that he had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body. Once he became stable, Raban embarked on an extended stay at a rehabilitation center, where he became acquainted...

Granta has long been known for the quality of its travel writing. The 1980s were the culmination of a golden age, when writers including Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of the beautiful, the extraordinary and the unexpected. By the mid 1990s, travel writing seemed to change, as a younger generation of writers that appeared in the...