Richard Grant, an Englishman with a US passport, used to be as footloose as the subjects of his first book (Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads), which won him the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. In 22 years, he had changed his address 18 times. He was “a wanderer, forever passing through, taking notes and moving on”.

Then he fell for an old plantation house, and set up home in the Mississsippi Delta. In his new book, Dispatches from Pluto, serialised in the Telegraph Magazine, he tells what he found in a place that’s at once “beautiful, tragic and totally batshit crazy”.