Publisher's description. For the first time, renowned travel writer Paul Theroux turns his penetrating gaze homeward, exploring the extraordinary places and peoples of the American Deep South. From soul food and wide open roads to endemic poverty and simmering racial tension, he journeys to the heart of a vivid and mesmerising world. (Penguin)His ability to sum up a people or a city in a few lines is undiminished (Daily Telegraph)Theroux's work remains the standard by which other travel writing must be judged (Observer)The world's most perceptive travel writer (Daily Mail)[Theroux] has the power to transport us and get under the skin of a place... the stories in Deep South make for a compelling listen (Duncan Minshull, BBC Radio 4)This engrossing book reminds us that despite the poverty, maybe because of it, everyone has a story to tell and it's the writer's job to bear such testimony (Financial Times)

SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER

Beloved travel writer Paul Theroux turns his attention to America, exploring the landscapes and communities of his homeland as an outsider for the first time

For the past fifty years, Paul Theroux has travelled to the far corners of the earth - to China, India, Africa, the Pacific Islands, South America, Russia, and elsewhere - and brought them to life in his cool, exacting prose. In Deep South he turns his gaze to a region much closer to his home.

Travelling through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, Paul Theroux writes of the stunning landscapes he discovers - the deserts, the mountains, the Mississippi - and above all, the lives of the people he meets.

The South is a place of contradictions. There is the warm, open spirit of the soul food cafes, found in every town, no matter how small. There is the ruined grandeur of numberless ghostly towns, long abandoned by the industries that built them. There are the state gun shows and the close-knit,subtly forlorn tribe of people who attend and run them. Deep in the heart of his native country, Theroux discovers a land more profoundly foreign than anything he has previously experienced.