After living in China for five years, and learning the language, Peter Hessler decided to undertake an even more complicated endeavor: he acquired his Chinese driving licence. An eye-opening challenge, it enabled him to embark on an epic journey driving across this most enigmatic of countries. Over seven years, he travelled to places rarely explored by tourists, into the factories exporting their goods to the world and into the homes of their workers. Full of extraordinary encounters and details of life beyond Beijing, it is an unforgettable, unique portrait of the country that will likely shape all our lives in the century to come.

Prizes

Long-listed for BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2010 (UK)

Modern China has seldom been better explained than by Peter Hessler in this imaginative and illuminating book, one that gives us a steering wheel-up view of the country's giddying economic and social transformation. -- Tim Butcher, author of Blood River
Funny and brilliantly written. I have not read anything quite like it before on China. -- Chris Patten
A masterly, learned, entertaining, kind and endlessly fascinating panorama of life in 21st-century China. -- Jan Morris
An extraordinary, genre-defying book . . .Beautifully constructed . . . Hessler's reportage is vivid. * * Daily Telegraph on Oracle Bones * *
Highly entertaining, hugely informative. * * Good Book Guide * *
[Hessler] has a sensitive eye for the sort of detail that can bring his account vividly alive even to those of us who have never been near the Far East, as well as an easy conversational style that almost makes you feel you have met him yourself. -- Nicholas Bagnall * * Sunday Telegraph * *
[Hessler] is very entertaining...he is engaged without being patronising, and offers insights into a country undergoing phenomenal change. -- Judith Rice * * Guardian * *
Impressively researched. ... [Hessler] writes with the authority of experience [yet] retains a delighted and delightful wonder. -- Laura Silverman * * Daily Mail * *

Peter Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he served as the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007 and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize, and Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for Excellence in reporting.