Deep South (Non-Fiction) by Paul Theroux with Photographs by Steve McCurry

Paperback:  That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South:  kindness, generosity, a welcome.  I had found it often in my travelling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace.  Yes, there is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it, and even longer to understand.

One of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time turns his unflinching eye on an American South too often overlooked.

Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away.

Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America - the Deep South.  He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It is these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux’s keen traveller’s eye.

Tell about the South.  What's it like there.  What do they do there.  Why do they live there.  Why do they live at all.

On road trips spanning four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits gun shows and small-town churches, labourers in Arkansas, and parts of Mississippi where they still call the farm up the road “the plantation.”  He talks to mayors and social workers, writers and reverends, the working poor and farming families - the unsung heroes of the south, the people who, despite it all, never left, and also those who returned home to rebuild a place they could never live without.

Deep South (2015) reminds us "that despite poverty, maybe because of it, everyone has a story to tell and it is the writer's job to bear such testimony" (Financial Times) and "casts an ever-sharp eye over life, history, community and hospitality below the Mason-Dixon line." (Wanderlust)

About the author:  Paul Edward Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1941.  He is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue about a trip he made by train from Great Britain through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Asia, then South-East Asia, up through East Asia, as far east as Japan, and then back across Russia to his point of origin.

Although perhaps best known as a travel writer with works such as The Last Train to Zona Verde, Dark Star Safari, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel and The Lower River, Theroux has also published numerous works of fiction such as Dr Slaughter, one of which were made into feature films.  He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast.

Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.