THE FOLIO SOCIETY

Seized with ‘a curious urge to go back to the land of my youth and make what the blurb writers like to call a journey of discovery’, Bill Bryson set off across the USA in his mother’s ageing Chevrolet.

This was the book that launched Bill Bryson as an entirely new kind of travel writer: delighting in the humour of the everyday and the unexpected oddities of normal life. Whether he is gently mocking the local radio stations ‘designed for people who have already lost their minds’, or his own inability to understand a friendly state trooper asking ‘hah doo lack Miss Hippy?’, Bryson’s writing is warm, funny and entirely delightful.

This new edition, the first to be illustrated, contains 16 pages of colour plates, showing off-the-beaten-track locations that Bill Bryson travels through, to capture the sense of a vast country that stretches from snow-capped mountains to desert wastes, and from endless fields of corn to the monuments of Washington.