Strangeland: How Britain Stopped Making Sense
About this ebook
'I like and trust Jon Sopel and you should too'
JOE LYCETT
'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
'A hugely entertaining and quite traumatic rollercoaster'
ARMANDO IANNUCCI
'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 HUSAIN
Returning 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.
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Jon Sopel was the BBC's North America Editor for 8 years, before launching The News Agents podcast with Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall in August 2022. During his time at the BBC, he covered the 2016 and 2020 elections and Trump's White House at first hand, reporting for the BBC across TV, radio and online, as well as presenting the highly successful Americast podcast with Emily Maitlis and Anthony Zurcher.
He is the author of If Only They Didn't Speak English: Notes from Trump's America, A Year at the Circus: Inside Trump's White House and UnPresidented: Politics, Pandemics and the Race that Trumped All Others.
