'His erudition is enorous, his prose as beautiful and clear as the blue ocean on a crisp morning . . . Passage to Juneau is a wonderfully fluid read' – Sunday Times
Passage to Juneau is an account of Raban's voyage from Seattle to the Alaskan capital by boat, and the devastating news that awaits him when he returns to dry land. In Raban's capable hands, the passage from Seattle to Alaska is less a journey than a backdrop for musings on history, art, myth, and philosophy.
Reissued with a new introduction from Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey, this is extraordinary travel writing, defying at every turns the constrains of genre.
'Raban at his best' – Ian McEwan
Author Information
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.