I'm hugely excited about any new Jonathan Raban book, and Waxwings is no exception, despite being fiction. There's a nice review over at The Guardian, ending with this, which contains a nice summary of why I like him - and an interesting note about 'human geography'.
"What he likes doing is blending genres, confounding categories. Fiction, non-fiction, travel, sociology. His first major book, Soft City, mixed journalism with drama, semiotics and literary criticism. Foreign Land itself began as another travel book, a false start at what, the following year, became Coasting. What he does, he says, is "what used to be called 'human geography': writing about place - about people's place in place, and their displacement in it". His views, ironic and humane, are always acute; always illuminating. His prose - agile, musky, particular - is a treasure."
