A Ride Across America
Simon Parker
September Publishing, £19.99, pp386
In the middle of a Washington State rainforest, early on in British travel writer Simon Parker’s 4,000-mile bike ride across the US, a fellow cyclist muses that his country “seems like it’s just one step away from catastrophe”. Which is effectively why Parker is here in the first place, to try to work out this vast nation via the lens of slow travel rather than clickbait. Parker magnificently chronicles the America he encounters, a divided, disfranchised collection of states he fears for but comes to love for their generosity, community spirit and sense of hope.
This Motherless Land
Nikki May
Doubleday, £16.99, pp352
Anglo-Nigerian author Nikki May played with traditional mystery tropes in her debut Wahala; this time she remixes Jane Austen in a spirited modern retelling of Mansfield Park set in Lagos and Somerset. Funke is sent to live in England when her mother dies. Her cousin Liv shows her how to break free of her restrictive new family, but social convention, family ties, inheritance and race are always bubbling under the surface. Across decades and continents, May marshals a series of page-turning and cinematic set pieces in slightly predictable but defiantly enjoyable fashion.
Be Mine
Richard Ford
Bloomsbury, £9.99, pp352 (paperback)
The final instalment in a five-book series – Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels have captured the entire sweep of a peculiar, boomerish generation in the US. When we first met Bascombe in 1986, he was a late-30s short story writer turned sportswriter. He’s still an observer of American life in all its excesses, absurdities and desperations; it’s just that Bascombe the part-time realtor now has the wistfulness and wisdom that come with impending mortality – both of himself and, here, his sick son. The lesson? “To be happy – before the grey curtain comes down.”
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