Super Furry Animals singer Gruff Rhys's travelogue American Interior is one of 11 stellar debuts longlisted for this year's Guardian first book award, from the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's incisive memoir of brain surgery to Sarah Perry's highly-praised first novel After Me Comes the Flood.
Boasting one of the longest subtitles crammed onto a book jacket so far this year "The quixotic journey of John Evans, his search for a lost tribe and how, fuelled by fantasy and (possibly) booze, he accidentally annexed a third of North America" Rhys's account of his journey in the footsteps of a farmhand from Snowdonia, who travelled to America at the tail end of the 18th century in search of a fabled tribe of Welsh-speaking native Americans, is one of five non-fiction titles longlisted for this year's Guardian prize. American Interior is selected alongside the artist Marion Coutts's devsatating account of the last years of her husband, Tom Lubbock, the art critic, who was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2008.
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