Strangeland : How Britain Stopped Making Sense

Published 26/09/2024 | Hardback,
Description:

‘I like and trust Jon Sopel and you should too’ – Joe Lycett’A hugely entertaining and quite traumatic rollercoaster’ – Armando Iannucci’A thrilling, nerve-wracking book. You couldn’t make the last ten years up; thanks to Jon Sopel, you don’t have to’ – Peter Frankopan’Acute and unflinching – Sopel deploys his foreign correspondent skills on home shores as well as far ones, and brings together the story of a tumultuous few years on both sides of the Atlantic’ – Mishal HusainReturning to the UK in some ways has been disconcerting – or maybe discombobulating would be a better word. It is, after all, my home; it is where I grew up, a country I love and am proud of. But either it’s changed, or I have. Maybe both.

It just feels like a strange land. At the beginning of 2022, after eight years of political reporting in the US, Jon Sopel returned home to the UK – and having spent almost a third of his career abroad, he found a very different place to the one he left. In Strangeland, his first book since launching the global hit podcast The News Agents, he asks: What is the Britain he’s come home to?In the US, Jon was the outsider looking in, firm in the belief that the common language of English masked our fundamental differences; in terms of values and beliefs, it seemed the British had much more in common with our European neighbours.

Strangeland is Jon’s account of how much that has changed. The US was a country he thought he knew well but didn’t really; returning home has been in some ways even more disconcerting – either Britain, the country he grew up in, has changed dramatically, or he has. Perhaps it’s both.

A trenchant analysis of politics, people, and everything in between, Strangeland is an unforgettable portrait of a country gone through the looking glass.