Jonathan Raban

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 hilarity events from his eccentric life at the heart of literary London. Reading it is like eavesdropping on a humane, rigorous and witty conversation.

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 settles for a few months as a good ol boy in a cabin on the lake with an elderly rented labrador. From there he flies to the promise of Seattle, talking with its thrusting but alienated Asian community, and thence to the watery lowlife of Key West. The result is a breathtaking observation of the States a travelogue, a social history and a love letter in one.

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 collision course, so Raban navigates the complex and turbulent waters of his own middle-age. Coasting is a fearless attempt to discover the meaning of belonging and of his English homeland.

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 inventive energy and its charming lethargy and come to know something of its soul.But the journey is as much the story of Raban as it is of the Mississippi. Navigating the dangerous, ever-changing waters in an unsuitably fragile aluminium skiff, he immerses himself as he tries to give shape to the river and the story finding himself by turns vulnerable, curious, angry and, like all of us, sometimes foolishly in love.

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 boomtowns, camels by Range Rovers. The sons of Bedouin nomads were now studying medicine in Europe and engineering in New York. Yet in this fast-moving world, old certainties remained.Rabans gift for friendship gives us a series of affectionate individual encounters which collectively create a true and invaluable picture of Arabian society.

At the turn of the millenium, two immigrants are drawn to the US by their own versions of the American Dream. But Tom is unjustly accused of a horrific crime and Chick has no safe place to lay his be

In a brave new post-9/11 world jumpy Seattle bears little resemblance to the city Lucy Bengstrom dreamed of as a girl. Living alone with her eleven-year-old daughter Alida, she looks to her journalism to make sense of it all. Yet with Alida drifting into adolescence and the home she's built up for them under threat, it's clear to Lucy that life is changing. Finding herself under intense scrutiny and faced with her toughest assignment yet, she begins to rebel against everything her personal and professional life has taught her. 'Chastening and darkly funny ...For all its gloomy prognostications on the way society is heading, "Surveillance" will only leave you wanting more' - Anthony Quinn, "Daily Telegraph". '"Surveillance" is a work that confirms Raban as one of the most original commentators on the times in which we live' - William Skidelsky, "New Statesman". 'A dense human comedy about truth and lies ...He writes easily, his prose is relaxed, conversational, his observations shrewd ..."Surveillance" is a novel for and about a US in which everyone wants to be American and in which security is the new terror.Raban's offbeat narrative is a cautionary one dealing with the upheaval of the crisis known as Now' - Eileen Battersby, "Irish Times".

El Pasaje Interior que va del golfo de Puget a Alaska es tortuoso, turbulento y profundo: se trata de una antigua ruta marina de miles de kilómetros, rica en remolinos y otros peligros, en la que florecióla cultura de la canoa de las Indias Noroccidentales. El desdichado barco británico Discovery, capitaneado por George Vancouver, pasó por estos estrechos pasos en 1792 y, tras él, comerciantes depieles, colonos, misioneros, antropólogos, pescadores y turistas, cada uno con sus propios planes acerca de este mar complejo y encantado. Cuando Jonathan Raban partió en solitario en su barcodesde su hogar de Seattle hasta el Panhandle de Alaska, su intención era resolver los muchos enigmas y significados del mar a través del arte y la mitología indios o los diarios de Vancouver y susoficiales. Su travesía, que comenzó como una aventura intelectual, pronto se encontró en unas aguas más profundas y peligrosamente personales de lo que había previsto. Así, este libro es no sólo elrelato de un viaje al corazón salvaje de Norteamérica sino también una profunda exploración del lado más agreste del corazón humano.

Jonathan Raban's caustic novel takes place in post-Y2K Seattle, where Tom Janeway is caught in the trajectory of current events (WTO riots, Al Qaeda fears) and his own deteriorating life, which includes the departure of his wife and not one but two brushes with the law. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.

In 1993 Jonathan Raban entered the Badlands, a place the size of England and the least visited region in all of the United States. Here he came across the ruins of a community and isolated homesteads. These homes, he realized, gave clues as to the characters and lives of the thousands of landless people who, seduced by the advertising of the railroad companies in the early 20th century, took the train West in search of new lives and a permanent agricultural community. What had happened to turn these homesteaders' hopes of a new beginning into such despair? The land which betrayed them turned out to be an America in miniature. This is their story.