Iain Sinclair breaks for the border with American Smoke, his first full engagement with the memory-filled landscapes of the American Beats and their fellow travellers, echoed as always in the mythologies of London, through which so many of them also passed.

In a book filled with bad journeys and fated decisions, this is a delirious expedition in the footsteps of Malcolm Lowry, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder and more, heated by obsession (the Old West, volcanoes, Mexico) and enlivened by false memories, broken reports and strange adventures.

With American SmokeSinclair confirms his place as the most innovative of our chroniclers of the contemporary.