LOST CONTINENT (PB)

After ten years in England, Bill Bryson returned to the USA and almost drove 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam – the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead, he discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land. This classic of travel literature is hilariously, stomach-achingly, funny, yet tinged with heartache.