It was a book which touched a nerve with his adopted homeland, the mix of affection for the beauty of the countryside and pangs of regret for aspects of the country which were fading into history making it a must read for a nation caught between past and future.īryson went on to become a prominent public figure, pumping out several more travel books before branching out into science ( A Short History of Nearly Everything), literary biography ( Shakespeare), memoir ( The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid) and being portrayed on screen by Robert Redford (the screen adaptation of his travel book A Walk in the Woods).

Today, we’re going to take a look at his most recent work, but not before we go back and look at an earlier book to which the later one owes a great debt 🙂īack in the mid-nineties, Bryson was a respected but little-known American writer, but that all changed with the publication of Notes from a Small Island, a travel book describing an extensive tour of Britain the author undertook before he and his family moved to the US. It might be time, then, to introduce his work to the blog, and thanks to a birthday present from my long-suffering wife (which is a Bryson reference in itself…), I have the perfect excuse. Now, that may not seem much of a surprise given my preference for fiction in translation, but I used to be a big fan of his books, and my collection is pushing double figures.

I was browsing my old posts the other day (as you do…) when I discovered that in the eight years I’ve been blogging I’ve never reviewed a Bill Bryson book.

Bill bryson small island