Miami is the American future - more Latin than North. In this volatile city, English is no longer the prevailing language or culture. Many of the inhabitants are loyal to another nation, regard themselves not as immigrants but as exiles, and nurse an abiding sense of having been betrayed by their host. As Miami and the nation's capital grow ever more distant, Didion documents an estrangement that is indicative of the corrosion now afflicting the famous melting pot...
Joan Didion's Miami is at once an aggressively real city and a legendary domain to which Swift might well have posted Gulliver, or Voltaire Candide. In this book Didion the novelist and Didion the moralist work hand in hand to create a work that combines intense imaginative vision with extraordinary argumentative force. In her exact, rational and appalled portrayal, Miami is the price that America is paying for the corrupted language in which it conducts its political business.
JONATHAN RABAN, 'Observer'
By the time one has finished this unflinching and acute book, ostensibly journalism but containing all the intrigue of a thriller, one is oneself on edge.
FRANCES SPALDING, 'TES'
Her book may be seen by many as recording the defeat of the American system.
CAL McCRYSTAL, 'Sunday Times'
I doubt I'll read prose any more beautiful than this in the next year... the writing and its message scorch like dry ice.
JOHN GILL, 'Time Out'
Miami the place is, to Didion's mind, the most interesting city in the US. 'Miami' the book is, to my mind, nothing short of brilliant.
LOUISE BERNIKOW, 'Cosmopolitan'
No one depicts place or passion or dislocation with more accuracy; no one can move us more deeply with the staccato repetition of the crazy facts of personal-political life than Joan Didion.
NEW STATESMAN
Joan Didion is one of America's most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.