• River Town and Oracle Bones were both New York Times bestsellers.

• Oracle Bones was a finalist for the National Book Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book, and a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Entertainment Weekly, and Minneapolis Star Tribune. River Town was a New York Times Notable book, a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Book of the Year, and won the Kiriyama Book Prize. In 2008, Hessler won an Overseas Press Club Award and the National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting for his coverage of Lishui’s attempt to build a factory town.

• Hessler has been researching and writing this book since 2001. He spent years cultivating relationships with a range of people he met on the road and in the villages and cities that he visited. Country Driving is full of their stories, which provide a stunning portrait of contemporary China through the eyes of everyday people living during an extraordinary time of change.

• Country Driving is the third and final book in Peter Hessler’s trilogy on China. Each book explores the nation’s changes through a different theme: River Town was about geography, or sense of place; and Oracle Bones was about history, or sense of time. And Country Driving focuses on economics and development, showing how the auto boom helps China shift from urban to rural, farming to business. All three books feature the experiences of average people, and together they span the first decade after Deng Xiaopin’s death in 1997—a critical period shaped primarily by the energy of migrant workers and small entrepreneurs.

In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver’s license, and for the next seven years he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved transport were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of the average people—farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs—who have reshaped the country during one of the most critical periods in its history.

Country Driving begins with Hessler’s 7,000-mile drive across northern China, following the Great Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He investigates an historically important rural region being abandoned as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. Next, Hessler spends five years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is paved and the capital’s auto boom brings new tourism. Finally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of three years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major industrial center. Country Driving illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against outsiders, is building roads and factory towns that look to the outside world.