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'A beautiful, compelling memoir. ... Father and Son is an
exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and
carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of
what must remain unsaid. This, Raban's final work, is a gorgeous
achievement" – Ian McEwan On 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 own
mortality. Together with the chronicle of his recovery is the
extraordinary story of his parents’ marriage, the early years of
which were conducted by letter while his father fought in the
Second World War. Jonathan Raban engages profoundly and candidly
with some of the biggest questions at the heart of what it means to
be alive, laying bare the human capacity to withstand trauma, as
well as the warmth, strength, and humour that persist despite it.
Father and Son, the final work from the peerless man of letters, is
a tremendous, continent-sweeping story of love and resilience in
the face of immense loss.
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 since the woman he loves is still back in Africa. Witty, charming and masterly crafted, Foreign Land is an exquisitely moving tale of awkward relationships and quiet redemption.
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Coasting (Paperback)
Jonathan Raban
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R407
R304
Discovery Miles 3 040
Save R103 (25%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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'A valuable book and a necessary one. One of the funniest and
cleverest voyages on record.' Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman
'The finest writer afloat since Conrad.' Geoffrey Moorhouse, The
Guardian 'Unfailingly witty and entertaining.' Salman Rushdie
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 he
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.
'Jonathan Raban is simply one of the great writers of non-fiction
at work today. I hold his work in awe.' Robert Macfarlane
'Unfailingly witty and entertaining.' Salman Rushdie 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 a 'rented' elderly lab. From there he flies to the
promise of Seattle, discovering 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.
'Jonathan Raban is one of the world's greatest living travel
writers.' William Dalrymple 'The best book of travel ever written
by an Englishman about the United States' Jan Morris, Independent
Navigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans,
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, 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. 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 with an irresistible emotional
intensity 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.
'Of all his generation's travellers, Jonathan Raban is the most
sophisticated, writing with a subtle and imaginative brilliance.'
Colin Thubron 'One of the most humane and visionary of all travel
writers.' Jeremy Seal Into Jonathan Raban's familiar Earls Court
neighbourhood after the 1970s oil boom came new visitors from the
Arab world, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks. A people
apart, little known, Raban wanted to get behind the myth and the
rumour to discover the reality of their lives and world. His
journey 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 - and cultural innovation lagged miles behind
economic change. Raban's gift for friendship introduces us to a
series of memorable individuals - rich and poor - set against the
feel, the smells, the sounds and the nuances of Arabia.
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Bad Land
Jonathan Raban
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R280
R219
Discovery Miles 2 190
Save R61 (22%)
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Ships in 5 - 10 working days
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Jonathan Raban's enthralling journey into the history of the Great
Plains of Montana – the least populated, most uncharted region of
the United States – to uncover the heart and soul of the country,
with a new introduction from Jane Smiley. Bringing to life the
extraordinary landscape of the prairie and the homesteaders whose
dreams foundered there, and reaching through history to the present
day, Bad Land uncovers the dangerous legacy of American innocence
gone sour. 'Bad Land should be recognized as a blazing classic' –
Sunday Telegraph
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 historical journey of the maddening Vancouver in his search for the North West Passage.
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Passage To Juneau
Jonathan Raban
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R275
Discovery Miles 2 750
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A entrancing travelogue from the late Anglo-American master of
letters, Jonathan Raban. Reissued with a new introduction from
Robert Macfarlane, Passage to Juneau is an account of Raban's
voyage from Seattle to the Alaskan capital by boat, and the
devastating news that awaits him when he returns to dry land. This
is extraordinary travel writing, defying at every turns the
constrains of genre. 'Raban at his best' – Ian McEwan
'Jonathan Raban is the only person I listen to in matters of travel
and books and writing in general. Reading him, talking to him as I
have over fifty years, he has made my work better and me happier.'
Paul Theroux 'For Love and Money ... is as good a book as there is
about the writing life. Delighted that it will be safeguarded in
print by Eland.' Tim Hannigan This collection of writing undertaken
for love and money is about books and travel, and makes for an
engrossing and candid exploration of what it means to live from
writing. 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
embarking on a humane, rigorous and witty conversation.
It took Kinglake seven years before he had finished crafting this
`lively, brilliant and rather insolent tale. The physical details
of the journey, undertaken in 1834 across the Balkan frontiers of
the Ottoman Empire, through Constantinople, Smyrna, Cyprus into the
Near eastern cities of Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus, are never as
significant as the conversations, chance encounters and attitudes
of the author. Packed full of an infectious charm and a youthful
delight at the world, it is above all things funny as it lampoons
the pomposity of earnest, middle?aged travellers seeking to
establish themselves as professional authorities.
With an introduction by Iain Sinclair In the city we can live
deliberately: inventing and renewing ourselves, carving out
journeys, creating private spaces. But in the city we are also
afraid of being alone, clinging to the structures of daily life to
ward off the chaos around us. How is it that the noisy, jostling,
overwhelming metropolis leaves us at once so energized and so
fragile? In Soft City, Jonathan Raban, one of our most acclaimed
novelists and travel writers seeks to find out. First published in
the 1970s, his account is a compelling exploration of urban life: a
classic in the literature of the city, more relevant to today's
overcrowded planet than ever.
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 helpless nostalgia for its lost past. Witty, elegaic, and magnificently erudite, Old Glory is as filled with strong currents as the Mississippi itself.
In 1982 Jonathan Raban set out alone in a 30 foot ketch to sail around Britain. He had never before handled a boat at sea, but wanted to inspect the strange country where he lived. This book is part travel book, part autobiography and part novel. By the author of "Arabia through the looking Glass".
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, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive.
In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories. Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West.
"Exceptional. . . . A beautifully told historical meditation. " --Time
"Championship prose. . . . In fifty years don't be surprised if Bad Land is a landmark." --Los Angeles Times
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
magazine made journeys for more complex and often personal reasons.
Decca Aitkenhead reported on sex tourism in Thailand, and Wendell
Steavenson moved to Iraq as foreign correspondent. What all these
pieces have in common is a sense of engagement with the places they
describe, and a belief that whether we are in Birmingham or
Belarus, there is always something new to be discovered.
This is an anthology of writing about the sea from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. It is extraordinarily varied, including fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, documentary accounts, and oceanographic writing. Familiar names, such as Byron, Defoe, Melville, and Conrad are well represented, but there are many new names too.
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 Crèvecoeur--"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 Crèvecoeur's wake to see how America has paid off for succeeding generations of newcomers. The result is an exhilarating, often deliciously funny book that is at once a travelogue, a social history, and a love letter to the United States. In the course of Hunting Mr. Heartbreak, Raban passes for homeless in New York and tries to pass for a good ol' boy in Alabama (which entails "renting" an elderly black lab). He sees the Protestant work ethic perfected by Korean immigrants in Seattle--one of whom celebrates her new home as "So big! So green! So wide-wide-wide!"--and repudiated by the lowlife of Key West. And on every page of this peerlessly observant work, Raban makes us experience America with wonder, humor, and an unblinking eye for its contradictions.
"Raban delivers himself of some of the most memorable prose ever written about urban America." --Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times
"When Raban describes America and Americans, he is unfailingly witty and entertaining." --Salman Rushdie
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