Country Driving

In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the long-time Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker, acquired his Chinese drivers licence. For the next seven years he travelled the country, tracking how the automobile and the improved transport system were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of everyday people farmers, migrant workers and entrepreneurs who have reshaped the country during one of the most critical periods in its history. Country Driving illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against outsiders, is building the roads and factory towns that will shape the twenty-first century.

Peter Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he served as the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007 and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize, and Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for Excellence in reporting.