Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings

"Raban is, for my money, one of the key writers of the past three decades - not only for his immense stylistic showmanship, but also for the way he has taken that amorphous genre call ''travel writing'' and utterly redefined its frontiers... Passage to Juneau is his finest achievement to date. Ostensibly an account of a voyage Raban took from his new home in Seattle to the Alaskan capital through that labyrinthine sea route called the Inside Passage, it is, in essence, a book about the nature of loss.... You close this extraordinary book marvelling at this most distressing but commonplace of ironies. He's home, but he's lost. Just like the rest of us' Douglas Kennedy, Independent. 'This is an extraordinary book... The epic journey through eddies, rips, whirlpools and various other marine terrors quickly becomes intensely personal... Passage to Juneau is far more than a meditation on the sea and its meanings; it is also an unsparing self-examination, written with mordant humour and forensic ruthlessness' Justin Cartwright, Daily Telegraph 'A thrilling adventure and a telling internal exploration.... the writing contains natural description of breathtaking exactness.... and the sea itself - in all its moods - has surely never been so intricately painted' Edward Marriott, Evening Standard 'His erudition is enormous, his prose as beautiful and clear as the blue ocean on a crisp morning and his sense of joy at having found his place in the world is immensely rewarding. Passage through Juneau is a wonderfully fluid read. It is also a thought-provoking and challenging work that is likely to splash around in the memory long after the volume has been consigned to the shelf'. Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times "