Jonathan Raban Books In Order

Novels

  1. Foreign Land (1985)
  2. Waxwings (2003)
  3. Surveillance (2006)

Non fiction

  1. The Technique of Modern Fiction (1968)
  2. Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1968)
  3. The Society of the Poem (1971)
  4. Soft City (1974)
  5. Arabia (1979)
  6. Old Glory (1981)
  7. Coasting (1986)
  8. For Love and Money (1987)
  9. God, Man and Mrs. Thatcher (1989)
  10. Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990)
  11. Bad Land (1996)
  12. Passage to Juneau (1999)
  13. My Holy War (2005)
  14. Here There Nowhere (2007)
  15. Driving Home (2010)
  16. Eothen (2019)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Jonathan Raban Books Overview

Foreign Land

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.

Waxwings

From the best selling author of Passage to Juneau Raban at his best, wrote Ian McEwan an unsettling, tender, and always surprising novel set in Seattle at the turn of the millennium, when the high tech Gold Rush threatens to overwhelm the actual world with its myriad virtual alternatives. Two immigrants, though, are drawn here by more traditional versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway a Hungarian born Englishman it is the wife and son he thought he d never have. For an illegal alien Chick, as he comes to call himself it is the land of opportunity he d imagined back in Fujian province. Given the overheated service economy, mutual need introduces the writer professor NPR commentator to this enterprising handyman, and each soon finds himself strangely dependent on the other. Because meanwhile, all around them, people are busily charting futures that are obscure to, or exclude, anyone else. Waxwings masterfully depicts the social realities of a boomtown in flux, as well as the illusions that distract its inhabitants from the most basic human impulse: to create a place we can call home. This is what Chick dreams of achieving, and what Tom must suddenly struggle to preserve. As the NASDAQ index spirals upward, street riots break out, a terrorist is arrested, a child disappears, a jetliner goes down and the city, rimmed with feral countryside, begins to emerge in its true colors. The Washington Post proclaimed of Foreign Land that Jonathan Raban’s achievements in this novel are nothing short of awesome, and with Waxwings exquisitely written and hugely entertaining he demonstrates more powerfully than ever before that he invests his characters with such freshness and warmth, writes prose of such Wordsworth like beauty, and does it all with such effortless mastery that he takes the reader s breath away.

Surveillance

In the not too distant future, national identity cards are mandatory, and America has become obsessed with intelligence gathering. The government’s scrutiny is omnipresent, civilians freely indulge their curiosity on the Internet, journalists pursue their investigations with relentless determination, and children both snoop on their parents and manipulate new technologies.

In Seattle, the unfulfilled actor Tad Zachary now performs mostly in the Department of Homeland Security s fictional disaster scenarios, while his friend and neighbor Lucy Bengstrom struggles to support her eleven year old daughter, Alida, on a freelance journalist s meager income with their landlord providing additional threats. Then Lucy is assigned to write a profile of August Vanags, a retired professor turned best selling author with his memoir of a childhood ravaged by World War II, but the validity of his account grows questionable, even as Lucy and Alida are charmed by both Vanags and his lonesome wife.

Everyone here is under Surveillance or conducting it, and at risk of confusing what might be true for what actually is a distinction not easily honored in a time of personal stress and widespread panic, when terrorist attack and literary fraud lurk around every corner. With precision and compassion, Jonathan Raban captures not only a peculiar period in our ongoing history but also a rich variety of lives caught up in fault lines that reach throughout society.

Soft City

‘A tour de force’ Jan Morris from the winner of the national book critics circle award. Jonathan Raban’s vivid, often funny portrait of metropolitan life is part reportage, part incisive thesis, part intimate autobiography, and a much quoted classic of the literature of the city. In an age when the big city has fewer friends than ever, this is a passionate and imaginative defense of city life, its ‘unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.’ Soft City, first published in 1974, records one man’s attempt to plot a course through the urban labyrinth. Holding up a revealing mirror to the modern city, Raban finds it a stage for a demanding and expressive kind of personal drama. Readers of Arabia 1979, Old Glory 1982, Hunting Mister Heartbreak 1990, and, more recently, Badlands 1997 will be delighted to discover this early work by one of the most inventive and enjoyable writers of our time.

Arabia

Arabia is the story of Jonathan Raban’s magic carpet ride through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. Not only does it reveal the Arabs and their culture, it also introduces us to a series of memorable individuals. Much of the book’s strength is the author’s gift for friendships. He brings us into markets and hotels to glamorous parties and seedy rooms, to a sheikh’s fortress and the home of a Bedu family. He opens up the world of the rich and the poor and gives us the feel, the smells, the sounds, the very texture of Arabia. ‘Beautifully written, poignant, funny, Arabia is more than travel book, it is a tale of the collision of cultures, observed at an historically crucial time.’ Publisher’s Source

Old Glory

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.

Coasting

Put Jonathan Raban on a boat and the results will be fascinating, and never more so than when he’s sailing around the serpentine, 2,000 mile coast of his native England. In this acutely perceived and beautifully written book, the bestselling author of Bad Land turns that voyage which coincided with the Falklands war of 1982 into an occasion for meditations on his country, his childhood, and the elusive notion of home. Whether he s chatting with bored tax exiles on the Isle of Man, wrestling down a mainsail during a titanic gale, or crashing a Scottish house party where the kilted guests turn out to be Americans, Raban is alert to the slightest nuance of meaning. One can read Coasting for his precise naturalistic descriptions or his mordant comments on the new England, where the principal industry seems to be the marketing of Englishness. But one always reads it with pleasure.

Hunting Mister Heartbreak

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 Cr vecoeur ‘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 Cr vecoeur’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 pas*ses 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

Bad Land

A New York Times Editors’ Choice for Book of the YearWinner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers AwardWinner 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 WorldIn 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 hero*ines, 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

Passage to Juneau

‘Raban is, for my money, one of the key writers of the past three decades not only for his immense stylistic showmanship, but also for the way he has taken that amorphous genre call ‘travel writing’ and utterly redefined its frontiers…
Passage to Juneau‘ is his finest achievement to date. Ostensibly an account of a voyage Raban took from his new home in Seattle to the Alaskan capital through that labyrinthine sea route called the Inside Passage, it is, in essence, a book about the nature of loss…
You close this extraordinary book marvelling at this most distressing but commonplace of ironies. He’s home, but he’s lost. Just like the rest of us’ Douglas Kennedy, ‘Independent’. ‘This is an extraordinary book…
The epic journey through eddies, rips, whirlpools and various other marine terrors quickly becomes intensely personal…
Passage to Juneau‘ is far more than a meditation on the sea and its meanings; it is also an unsparing self examination, written with mordant humour and forensic ruthlessness’ Justin Cartwright, ‘Daily Telegraph’. ‘A thrilling adventure and a telling internal exploration…
the writing contains natural description of breathtaking exactness…
and the sea itself in all its moods has surely never been so intricately painted’ Edward Marriott, ‘Evening Standard’. ‘His erudition is enormous, his prose as beautiful and clear as the blue ocean on a crisp morning and his sense of joy at having found his place in the world is immensely rewarding. ‘Passage through Juneau’ is a wonderfully fluid read. It is also a thought provoking and challenging work that is likely to splash around in the memory long after the volume has been consigned to the shelf’ Anthony Sattin, ‘Sunday Times’.

My Holy War

What does the ‘war on terror’ and a new era of religious ferocity look like to an Englishman living in the Pacific Northwest? Jonathan Raban finds that as he reads the source texts that have inspired modern day jihad, memories of his own rigidly fundamentalist adolescent atheism help him understand why young people suffering from cultural alienation, spiritual emptiness, and moral uncertainty turn to a backward looking version of Islam to help them resist the upheavals of modernity. Raban reflects on the Bush administration’s manipulation of the threat of terrorism to undermine civil rights. In diagnosing what has gone wrong in the Iraq war, he emphasizes the US failure to understand the history of the Middle East and its loyalties of religion and ethnicity. He traces the continuing support for a disastrous war to the legacy of American Puritanism: the tendency of Americans no one more so than President Bush himself, our ‘Pastor in Chief,’ to whose reelection it was key to be inspired by a religious fervor and sense of predestination oblivious to history and reason. And he explores the increasing polarization of American politics, as exemplified by the issues that he has seen divide his urban from his non urban neighbors in the Northwest.

Driving Home

For more than thirty years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an Englishman transplanted in Seattle, about what it means to feel rooted in America. Spanning two decades, Driving Home charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by a super sensitive, all seeing eye. Raban spots things we might otherwise miss; he calls up the apt metaphors that transform things into phenomena. He is one of our most gifted observers Newsday. Stops en route include a Missoula bar, a Tea Party convention in Nashville hosted by Sarah Palin, the Mississippi in full flood, a trip to Hawaii with his daughter, a steelhead river in the Cascades, and the hidden corners of his adopted hometown, Seattle. He deftly explores public and personal spaces, poetry and politics, geography and catastrophe, art and economy, and the shifts in various arenas that define our society. Whether the topic is Robert Lowell or Barack Obama, or how various painters, explorers, and homesteaders have engaged with our mythical and actual landscape, he has an outsider’s eye for the absurd, and his tone is intimate, never nostalgic, and always fresh. Frank, witty, and provocative, Driving Home is part essay collection, part diary and irresistibly insightful about America s character, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies.

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