Having been lucky enough to spend a little time in Patagonia (in 2014, in the run-up to the 150th anniversary of the founding of a Welsh settlement there), I’m looking forward to the first UK publication of False Calm (Daunt Books, £10.99 July 31), a 2005 book in which María Sonia Cristoff chronicles life in the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom.

Cristoff, who was born in Trelew in 1965, the daughter of Bulgarian immigrants, returns to the region after nearly two decades in Buenos Aires to explore Patagonia’s “complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and first-hand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld.”

Thanks to Andy Adams, a great champion of photography through FlakPhoto Digest, for alerting me via Bluesky to the publication in the US of The Last American Road Trip (Flatiron Books/Macmillan, $29.99, April 1), in which Sarah Kendzior, with her husband and children, “watches the landscape of the country — physical, environmental, social, political — transform through the car window”. The St Louis-based journalist, whose bestselling books include The View from Flyover Country, takes a series of trips across the US “as cataclysmic events –- the rise of autocracy, political and technological chaos, and the pandemic –- reshape American life”. The family “explore Route 66, national parks, historic sites and Americana icons as Kendzior contemplates love for country in a broken heartland”.

There’s a brief audio excerpt from the book on the Macmillan website, and I see that Kendzior is the latest person to respond to Sari Botton’s excellent Memoir Land author questionnaire.