In his latest, fascinating volume of travel writing, Paul Theroux turns his gaze on the country in which he lives, venturing into the southern states, to North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama. He attempts to dig beneath the cliches of the south, the hospitality, the food, the music, visiting places where the legacy of segregation can still be felt, where blacks and whites still worship in different churches, where poverty is deep scored. Some of the places he visits remind him more of remote towns in Africa than the America with which he is familiar.
Though the sun-blasted clapboard landscape through which he travels is beautifully captured by photographer Steve McCurry, this is also a journey that is very much shaped by the literature of the south, and Theroux includes digressions on Faulkner, as well as on the social, political and linguistic complexity of the N-word.
Deep South is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). Click here to order it for £16
