After scouring 40 books from the four corners of Britain, 9,000 readers have voted for the title which best voices what they see as the soul of their region.
Their choice for England, announced today, is a book by an American author which says the country has spent the past 50 years viewing itself as "a chronic failure".
The good news is that Bill Bryson's account of England, in Notes from a Small Island, gets rosier. The bad news is that the pictures of Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland given by home-grown authors are even worse.
The poll, staged to mark World Book Day, set out to find books which "sum up the zeitgeist" of each region. It was carried out in bookshops and libraries and on the web.
An extract from Bryson's work, picked by 4,000 readers from a shortlist of 10 works, says: "Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure.
"The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in the view."
Bryson, born in Iowa, spent 20 years in England, and will shortly be returning. He was "grateful and surprised" to win.
The Welsh book is Lewis Davies' Work, Sex and Rugby, a title based on the remark that there is nothing else to do in Wales.
The Northern Irish choice, Desire Lines by Annie McCartney, views any sign of development as good: "Large swaths of the inner city had been turned into urban motorways or car parks. The whole city seemed to be a continuous building site. It was a developers' paradise. There was an optimistic feel to the place."
The Scottish choice, Des Dillon's Me and Ma Gal, beat novels by Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin to give its region an even blunter voice.
· The John Murray collection, one of the most important literary archives in the world, much of which has never been open to researchers, is about to be put on the market and is being pursued by the National Library of Scotland.
The John Murray company, started in 1762, was until its recent takeover the oldest independent publisher in the world. The 150,000 item collection contains manuscripts and proof copies of work by the great writers of the 19th century from Jane Austen to Charles Darwin, the letters of David Livingstone and manuscripts by William Gladstone.
