Driving Home
Driving Home is a collection of Jonathan Raban's travel writing and essays, spanning two decades and charting its course through American history and world events.
Jonathan Raban has written about people and places in transition or on the margins, of journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached; of isolation and alienation, but also of what it means to belong, to feel rooted.
He writes with an outsider’s eye for the public and the personal, about political, social, and cultural affairs, and about literature, his tone intimate but never nostalgic, and always fresh.
Variously frank, witty, and provocative, Driving Home is part essay collection, part diary – and wholly engrossing.
‘A passionate history buff and a skilled raconteur . . . it’s a fine ride’ – Sunday Times
‘A fabulous collection’ – Observer
Jonathan Raban was the author of over a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia, Soft City, Waxwings and Surveillance. Over the span of six decades, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other magazines.
In 1990 Raban, a British citizen, moved from London to Seattle, where he lived with his daughter until his death in 2023.