Paul Theroux has spent more than 50 years closely depicting the world, for example, on the trains of Asia in The Great Railway Bazaar or the heart of Africa in Dark Star Safari. Travel writing is more than simple adventure for him: "I always knew travel to be an enlargement of life, something richer than anything I'd experience at home. But... travel also offers an expansion of time."
True North focuses on a country that many in the U.S. have spent decades failing to actually see: Canada. What begins as the completion of a North American road trip trilogy becomes, once Theroux discovers his ancestral roots in the Quebec soil, a more personal quest. His forebear left France in 1693 for what was then Nouvelle France, eventually settling in the village of Yamaska, where many Theroux still live. That discovery gives this narrative its organizing emotion; Theroux the traveler is also a man tracing the long, obscure line of his own heritage.
From that Quebec starting point, Theroux (Mother Land) drives west and east. He ventures through the snowbound Ottawa of political protests, out to the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, through Toronto's immigrant neighborhoods, and on to Vancouver's Pacific edges. Along the way, he often meets and talks with other writers, such as John Irving, who lives in Toronto. The Canada Theroux finds is a nation being tested by the loudest possible provocation during the second Trump administration's threats of annexation and tariffs, and discovering, in that friction, a patriotism it had previously been too modest to claim earlier. True North is Theroux's masterful, timely dispatch: sprawling, intimate, and alive on every page. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.