South and West

‘Didion at her most fascinatingly unfiltered, recording folksy vernacular at a motel pool, having G & Ts with Walker Percy, and searching fruitlessly for Faulkner’s grave in an Oxford cemetery … her riffs on everything from Gertrude Atherton to crossing the Golden Gate bridge for the first time in three-inch heels captures the thrill of a writer discovering her richest subject: the American mythologies that governed her own romantic girlhood, a yearning for an MGM-style heritage that never really was – a yearning that feels freshly perilous in its delusions.’ Vogue

‘Every era needs better criticism … And so it’s been a relief to read [South and West], investigating the South and its “vertiginous preoccupation with race, class, heritage, style and the absence of style”’ Adam Thirlwell, TLS, Books of the Year

‘Let your heart skip a beat. For here be new writing from the mind behind The Year of Magical Thinking and The White Album – Joan Didion. But this isn’t just for Didionites … For an understanding of certain parts of modern America, it still has eerie resonance … An insight into the process of a writer who can truly be referred to as an icon’ Emerald Street

‘A compelling book — rooted utterly in a past now all but lost to us, while also incredibly timely and relevant … It bears the hallmarks of Didion’s sparkling prose’ Los Angeles Review of Books

‘You’ll learn more about America’s future from Didion’s 40-year-old field notes than you will from tomorrow’s newspaper’ Esquire

‘There’s a universal rule against reading someone else’s diary – but in this case, it’s not just OK, it’s required reading’ Marie Claire

‘The power of Didion’s work is on striking display in this slender volume … Didion’s notes are remarkably polished and slicing; they shimmer with dark implications’ Booklist

‘Here are many of the splendid, sharp-eyed sentences for which [Didion] has long been admired … An almost spectral text haunted by a past that never seems distant’ Kirkus Reviews

Joan Didion is one of America’s most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.