To be fair, Bill Bryson does have plenty of good things to say about Australia. He also has quite a lot to say about Australians: They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it's okay now because he's off the life support machine and they've discovered he can communicate with eye blinks. We meet quirky characters and Australian wildlife galore - from the poisonous snakes to the brutal kookaburra Incidentally, did you know that the kookaburra likes to bash its prey until their bones have been pulverized? Apparently its easier to digest that way.lovely. As with his other traveling books, Bill Bryson hip hops his way across a country - visiting monuments and interviewing natives. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space. Lovely little adventure a la Bill Bryson No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. October 8 sees the publication of A Really Short History of Nearly Everything. His next book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, is a memoir of growing up in 1950s America, featuring another appearance from his old friend Stephen Katz. It was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, before going on to win the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. A Short History of Nearly Everything was lauded with critical acclaim, and became a huge bestseller. In his last book, he turned his attention to science. Other travel books include the massive bestseller Notes From a Small Island, which won the 2003 World Book Day National Poll to find the book which best represented modern England, followed by A Walk in the Woods (in which Stephen Katz, his travel companion from Neither Here Nor There, made a welcome reappearance), Notes From a Big Country and Down Under.īill Bryson has also written several highly praised books on the English language, including Mother Tongue and Made in America. It was followed by Neither Here Nor There, an account of his first trip around Europe.

In The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson's hilarious first travel book, he chronicled a trip in his mother's Chevy around small town America. He and his family then moved to New Hampshire in America for a few years, but they have now returned to live in the UK.

He lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He settled in England in 1977, and worked in journalism until he became a full time writer. William McGuire 'Bill' Bryson, OBE, FRS was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951.

In a sunburned country sparknotes