Ian Frazier’s travels have taken him to Siberia, across the Great Plains and through the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. In his next book, he’s exploring a little closer to his home in Montclair, New Jersey. Paradise Bronx (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 20) is being trumpeted by his publisher as his “magnum opus”. Frazier, who has been walking the streets and hills of the Bronx for the past 15 years, “reveals the amazingly rich and tumultuous history of this amazingly various piece of our greatest city. From Jonas Bronck, who bought land from the local Native Americans, to the formerly gang-wracked South Bronx that gave birth to hip-hop, [his] loving exploration is a moving tour de force about the polyglot culture that is America today.”

You can read an extract in The New Yorker, or a briefer one on the group publisher’s website (though given the geographical detail it opens with, you might want to glance at a map, too).