For the past four years Jane Miller, author of Crazy Age: Thoughts on Being Old, has been writing a column for an American magazine called In These Times. Her beautifully observed pieces about life, politics and Britain open a window to her American readers of a world very different from their own.

Jane lives in London, and has never met anyone connected to the magazine; all the time she has been contributing pieces, she and her editor at In These Times have kept up a lively email correspondence, and - having explored the Chicago street in which they work on Google Street View - she imagines her editor and his young assistants bicycling efficiently along the wide road, braced for a day's fact-checking, assembling the magazine and then 'putting it to bed'.

In My Own Time is a celebration of the new connections possible in the modern world, and a collection of small windows on these last four years, at home and abroad. Through her emails across the Atlantic - warm and thoughtful, witty and sharp - Miller gives us an 84 Charing Cross Road for the twenty-first century.