‘His masterpiece. Despite its stated purpose as a eulogy to a lost world, it seems hardly to have aged at all. Part of the book’s staying power resides in the synthesis Abbey created between the American desert — the red-rock canyons, “Abbey’s country” — and the beautiful, hard-chiselled prose, as rough and gorgeous as the land itself, that he used to celebrate its harshness and mystery. None have matched his style’ Salon‘Like a ride on a bucking bronco . . . rough, tough, combative. The author is a rebel and an eloquent loner. His is a passionately felt, deeply poetic book . . . set down in a lean, racing prose, in a close-knit style of power and beauty’ New York Times‘An American masterpiece … part memoir, part meditation on nature, part crusty and slightly mad cultural commentary’ New Yorker‘An uncommonly beautiful love letter to solitude and the spiritual rewards of getting lost. A miraculously beautiful book’ Brain Pickings‘Edward Abbey is the Thoreau of the American West’ Washington Post’Abbey’s voice, like that of Thomas Paine in Common Sense, never fades away … President Trump, please read Desert Solitaire’ Douglas Brinkley, New York Times