Short Synopsis
Dispatches from the new Britain: a slyly funny and compulsively readable portrait of a nation finally refurbished for the twenty-first century.

Full Synopsis
Sarah Lyall, a reporter for the New York Times, moved to London in the mid-1990s and soon became known for her amusing and incisive dispatches on her adopted country. As she came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), she found that she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life. The roller-coaster decade of Tony Blair's New Labor government was an increasingly materialistic time when old-world symbols of aristocratic privilege and stiff-upper-lip sensibility collided with modern consumerism, overwrought emotion, and a new (but still unsuccessful) effort to make the trains run on time. Appearing a half-century after Nancy Mitford's classic Noblesse Oblige, Lyall's book is a brilliantly witty account of twenty-first-century Britain that will be recognized as a contemporary classic.

"Lyall is a first-rate reporter, and her book has all the hallmarks of her journalism: it is warm, blunt, confessional, companionable." ---The New York Times

"Campbell's performance impressively complements the author's...assembly of posts...as she explores what it truly means to be British." ---AudioFile

"Lyall...has a keen eye for oddities and a tart prose style for recording them." ---The Washington Post

"Lyall's writing is, as always, witty and tart." ---Publishers Weekly

"[Campbell] perfectly captures the British voices, cadences, and nuances, adding significantly to the overall enjoyment of this delightful, hilarious look at our cousins across the pond." ---Library Journal Starred Audio Review

New York Times Bestseller

New York Times Bestseller

Library Journal Audio