Bryson's acclaimed first hit, The Lost Continent is a travel literary classic - hilarious, stomachache, hilarious, but tinged with anguish - and the book that first brought into play Bill Bryson's claim as the writer. most beloved of his generation.
After ten years in England, American writer Bill Bryson returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set.
Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres.
He discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land.
