David Sedaris investigates in The Land and Its People, what it means to be a traveller, a brother, a lifelong friend. Trying on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip-replacement surgery. It is a familiar Sedaris set-up: domestic discomfort turned into comic material, with a swipe of competitiveness. “I Know all about kidney stones and gum surgery. I know about broken ribs and urinary tract infections. When it came to hip pain, though, he had me,” he writes. Sedaris approaches with his usual cool composure and flashes of humour. In one essay, he lists the friends he has lost whose names he still keeps in his digital address book: his first agent Don Congdon, or Harry Rowohlt, a translator he had worked with, for example, What could easily have been a melancholy catalogue of the departed instead becomes a series of affectionate portraits, each entry accompanied by a small memory of the person. His sister Gretchen has been diagnosed with cancer and Sedaris’s instinctive decision to buy her a warm cape – and only this cape – could keep my sister alive,” he recalls. But as soon as she is cured, he cannot resist the thought: “I want that cape back.”

Revisiting his fractured relationship with his father, he writes: “I don’t ever have to call or write to him again. I’m free!” If his repertoire of irritations, bodily ailments and humorous asides can sometimes feel well worn, moments like these cut through the comedy, revealing pain and humanity beneath.

He covers the ground with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tire. A ambivalent Duolingo bot becomes his unlikely confidante as he attempts to describe is family in a foreign language. Ever adding to his list of “Countries I Have Been To,” he rides a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buys a bespoke priest’s cassock in Vatican City, and goes on Safari in Kenya without taking a single photo.

Time takes its toll: scrolling through his address book, he counts those he couldn’t bear to outlive, and realizes how many are already gone. He is bitten by a dog and insulted by a wee train passenger. A woman on the street late at night either sexually harasses him or doesn’t. It’s easy to agree with the lady waving a sign that reads, “Enough is Enough.” And yet, life holds much to delight in: the massive testicles of a ram, a trip abroad with his sisters, a really excellent reptile video, a pair of well-made cotton underpants.

Throughout these essays- at once acerbic and tender, playful and profound- Sedaris shows how  much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity our fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.

In my mind, I’m like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there,” the bestselling American humourist, David Sedaris wrote in 2002. 

There is his signature blend of self-deprecation “ I’m an idiot, basically” – and exasperation with the world around him. In “Little America”, he rails against the decline of public etiquette, citing passengers ignoring assigned seats on trains or playing music without headphones. “I’m in the hard part of getting old,” he says, “the part where everything irritates you”.

Ageing, bodily decline and mortality loom large over the 28 essays, some of which were originally published in The New Yorker.

The Land and Its People by David Sedaris, Abacus £20/ Little, Brown $30, 272 pages.