Two women, in their forties and fifties, set out to document a road trip across the United States. One of their books fizzes with fun and optimism; the other sings a dire threnody for what we have lost. Perhaps now more than at any other time, paradox and dissonance characterise the world itself. Taken together, these two volumes capture something of our dizzying reality. I enjoyed both enormously.

In Peach Street to Lobster Lane, Guardian food writer Felicity Cloake, who has previously bicycled round France in search of the tastiest croissant, points her handle­bars towards America in order to discover ‘whether [the United States] has a food culture’. Hopping on trains between stints in the saddle, Cloake spends eleven weeks munching her way from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to Brooklyn Bridge in New York, staying, along the way, in motels, in her tent and with friends, or couch-surfing via a cyclists’ app. In freewheeling prose she conjures up freeze-dried beef organ smoothies and ice cream made from a chef’s wife’s breast milk, as well as grasshopper shakes, cauliflower-crust pizza and a $14.75 sourdough loaf at the original branch of Tartine. 

Cloake notes several times that everything is more expensive than it is in the UK, but otherwise refrains from social comment – and why not? She was there to eat, and she did. Crucially, and unlike many food writers, she does not take herself too seriously: ‘the line … between