Gavin Young' s North American odyssey took him from Central Park and the old Atlantic whaling ports all the way to a tiny cabin in the Yukon, where Jack London heard 'the call of the wild'. Whether sleuthing through riot-racked Los Angeles in the footsteps of Philip Marlowe, crossing the Arizona Desert on Route 66 like Steinbeck's Depression-era migrant workers or searching for the characters of Cannery Row in Monterey, Young brilliantly uses the past to illuminate the present.

'Gavin Young is perpetually inquisitive, racially colour-blind, intrepid, reflective and gregarious ... plainly a man in a million, and a writer in two.' Bernard Levin

'He catches the mind's eye of the reader very deftly ... and, without losing his sense of irony, gives us a genuine account of the tragedy and the pathos, as well as the optimism and bravery, that created American civilization.' Christoper Hitchens, Mail on Sunday