A car accident knocks a sixtysomething surfer’s life off balance in the veteran travel writer and novelist’s intricate page-turner

Scribbled observations, dinner party conversations, flashes of perception ... inspired by Henry James’s jottings, Paul Theroux, Susie Boyt and Amit Chaudhuri share their note-taking habits

The veteran writer’s ‘fictionalised memoir’ of matriarchal tyranny reads like an act of projection too far

Hurt, rage and contempt … a novel captures the author’s experiences of family life

A literate exploration of America’s southern states reveals a rich culture, stark divisions and deep-seated poverty

Actor Henry Goodman reads Theroux’s Deep South: Four Seasons On Back Roads, which sees the writer discover the dark side of the former Confederate states

The most un-American of all American cities is bathed in literary culture. Anisse Gross investigates Hawaiian detective novels and alerts us to stories of Pearl Harbor, examines Hawaii’s oral tradition and sifts through the many writers who spent time on its sands – from marathon correspondent Hunter S Thompson to novice surfer Mark Twain

In stories of unknowable fathers and bewildered children, Theroux reveals the eccentricity and violence beneath the surface of ordinary American life. By Patrick Flanery

Dickens, Zola and early 20th-century timetables all transport the reader, finds novelist and railway fanatic Andrew Martin