Awards

• Short-listed for Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2000
• Short-listed for Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award 2000
• Shortlisted for Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2000.
• Shortlisted for Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award 2000.

Overview

'A moving, complex mosaic of memory, history and adventure'-Sunday TelegraphFollowing his dusty travels for Bad Land-described as a 'blazing classic' and whose many prizes included the US National Book Critics Circle Award-Jonathan Raban returns to sea, sailing up the coast of Canada to Juneau in Alaska.'Most beautifully told, vivid and fresh with observation. It looks like a travel book, but it's much less expected and more troubling than that'-Spectator'Unlike other travel books this is the genuine article... it is a thrilling adventure'-The Times'This is an extraordinary book. The voyage itself is fascinating... his observations are of the highest order'-Daily Telegraph

Full Product Details

9780330346290

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Reviews

A rich, multilayered narrative of solitary travel through a vast and chilly landscape. Raban (Bad Land, 1996; Hunting Mister Heartbreak, 1991; etc.), a Londoner resident in Seattle, is one of the English-speaking world's great travelers and travel writers. Here he crafts a wonderfully literate account, full of thoughtful observation and self-deprecating humor, of a sailing trip up the Inside Passage from the Puget Sound to the Alaska Panhandle. He is not, he admits, a great mariner - I am afraid of the sea . . . I'm not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I'm at sea - and the boat he bought for his voyage was chosen less for its sturdiness than for its built-in bookcases, which could house a fine library. Raban's journey is indeed bookish, full of observations culled from his readings. It's also set in parallel with other voyages, foremost among them that of the English sailor and explorer George Vancouver two centuries before. Along the way, Raban visits Native American villages, where he meets a Tsimshian man who presses his children to learn Japanese, Spanish, and computer science so that the Tsimshian people can take a place in the coming millennium; passengers on the ever-present cruise ships that ply the waters of the Inside Passage, the butts of countless Alaskan jokes and even undisguised scorn; and down-on-their-luck workers lured to the North by the promise of high wages but who never managed to punch the right ticket. For all the people Raban meets along his journey, however, his is a fundamentally lonely narrative, marked by sorrowful passages on the concurrent dissolution of his marriage and on the decline of the literary culture he so ably represents. Impeccably written and told, this will be irresistible to Raban's many admirers, as well as those who value a good story. (Kirkus Reviews)

The author voyages in his own small boat northward from Seattle along the wild, romantic and dangerous coast of British Columbia to Alaska. To reach the remote communities of this coast the sea is the only highway and so he followed in the wake of such early explorers as the unimaginative and eccentric Captain Vancouver RN, who charted the coast diligently, but failed to understand anything of the Indian gods who resided in the sea, giving life and taking it away with indifference. All memories of these ancient certainties were swept away by the missionaries and adventurers that soon followed. In attempting to disentangle and find direction in the chaos of cultures that resulted, Raban is ever aware that he and all the people that he encounters are part of the maelstrom. An absorbing book. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Jonathan Raban was born in Norfolk in 1942. He lives in Seattle, and is the author of eight previous novels, Soft City, Arabia, Old Glory, Foreign Land, For Love and Money, Coasting, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, and Bad Land. He has also edited the Oxford Book of the Sea and written a non-fiction book, Passage to Jueau.

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