His is a passionately felt, deeply poetic book. The author is a rebel and an eloquent loner. None have matched his style' Salon 'Like a ride on a bucking bronco. Part of the book's staying power resides in the synthesis Abbey created between the American desert - the red-rock canyons, 'Abbey's country' - and the beautiful, hard-chiselled prose, as rough and gorgeous as the land itself, that he used to celebrate its harshness and mystery. Despite its stated purpose as a eulogy to a lost world, it seems hardly to have aged at all. Now published in a special edition to celebrate its 50th Anniversary, this classic seems remarkably prescient, and has lost none of its power.

In his own irascible style, Abbey uses his time in the desert to meditate on the tension between nature and civilisation, and outlines a personal philosophy that would come to heavily influence the environmentalist movement. He experiences both sides of his new home its incredible beauty and its promise of liberation, but also its isolating, cruel side, at one point discovering a dead tourist at an isolated area of the Grand Canyon. His summers become spirit quests, taking him in search of wild horses and Ancient Puebloan petroglyphs, up mountains and across tribal lands, and down the Glen Canyon by river. Living out of a trailer, Abbey captures in rapt, poetic prose the landscape of the desert a world of terracotta earth, empty skies, arching rock formations, cliffrose, juniper, pinyon pine and sand sage. 'My favourite book about the wilderness' Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild In this shimmering masterpiece of American nature writing, Edward Abbey ventures alone into the canyonlands of Moab, Utah, to work as a seasonal ranger for the United States National Park Service.

Desert solitaire