He dreamed it was just a usual day at home, with Dulcie nagging on, and Mam baking, and Dad coming in from work and taking his boots off with a satisfied sigh. I saw a prosperous and richer UK in 2016, with even the small towns looking well-heeled and booming.

I can't believe how much the UK has changed since this was written, and it didn't take long into this funny and acutely observant travelogue to notice we are smack bang in the early 80s: violent skinheads congregating on public transport.Overall, this was a good little adventure story of a boy surviving on his own by the ocean after his home gets bombed out in WWII.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Being his usual miserable persona, Theroux doesn't spare the locations he visits and the people he meets just because they happen to be British. Wry, observant and always seeing the empty half of the glass (unless it's filled with sludge), he travels the length of the coast of the UK by train and on foot, avowedly skipping castles and cathedrals and under-sampling cities.The title of the book is taken from the opening lines of the poem Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe: It was many and many a year ago/ In a kingdom by the sea,/ That a maiden there lived whom you may know/ By the name of Annabel Lee.

Vielleicht lag es aber auch daran, dass Paul Theroux teilweise sehr ins Detail gegangen ist, das aber an unpassenden Stellen getan und somit auf mich oft kleinlich gewirkt hat.He does get things wrong: from, famously now, claiming that there is no pier in Wigan to stating that crowdie is equivalent to porridge and a crofter is some old fashioned way of describing a tenant farmer. The only time he seems to like what he sees is when is in the far-north of Great Britain, on the North Sea in Scotland. Maggi has but one hope when her father is offered a job on the renovation of a stately home in the English countryside of Cheshire. Nowhere in Britain is more than 65 miles from the sea so he decided his route would be round the coast. Though the book is aimed at young adults, Westall doesn't patronise or shy away from more adult ideas, and for this reason, I found it still spoke to me, despite being many years outside the target audience.