Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country

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I doubt Bryson would top anyone's list of people to be stuck in a lift with, and yet you can't help hanging on his every word and ascribing it the status of the gospel truth. First, the downside - and the crucial dividing line that distinguishes true travel writing from a superior tourist guide. There is no shortage of idiots - which is why Down Under will sell thousands more copies than Anglo-Australian Attitudes.

Not so James Urquhart in the Financial Times: "Down Under exhibits a smoother and more mature humour than previous works. The people are cheerful, extroverted, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging: their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines.

This is, after all, a man who sits through the capital's promotional tourist video, Canberra - It's Got It All! These are interspersed with occasional excursions into the history, geography, politics or scientific facts and curiosities about particular places.

His new number one Sunday Times bestseller is The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island.His new book The Body: A Guide for Occupants was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize and is an international bestseller. His bestselling books include The Road to Little Dribbling, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, One Summer and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. Bryson's books seem so simple - solipsistic narrator, quick tour of country, lots of anecdotes, dash of humour, a few all-embracing conclusions - that some reviewers dismiss the skill with which they are put together. Ignoring such dangers - and yet curiously obsessed by them - Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country.

This book shows its roots - in a colour supplement commissioned by The Mail On Sunday, padded out with some A-level history and lots of twee observations of a country crossed at speed.By beginning on the far Eastern area, to the Southeast,and then walking us through towns that vary in climate, style of living , and people themselves, this is a journey well worth taking. He arrives at his destination, finds a hotel, meanders around the neighbourhood, has a couple of drinks, eavesdrops on a conversation or two, then goes to bed. The Lost Continent (1989) was a rite of passage: when his father died it prompted him to discover the continent lost with his youth.