The North Road

‘Haunted and haunting: Cowen tracks the London-Edinburgh highway in a mesmerising exploration of time, place, memory and identity. A dazzlingly inventive work of literature.’

Robert Macfarlane

‘This thought-provoking and beautiful exploration of that most humanised of spaces, the road, shows how our lives are always intimately bound to those of others within the social landscape. Through sharing and celebrating this common journey, Cowen manages to demonstrate the wonder of what it is to be alive. This is a book that will have your heart ringing like a bell.’

Matt Gaw

'A dazzling, dogged, layered account of one road’s passage through place, time and an ordinary family’s history, The North Road truly is a trip.'

Melissa Harrison

‘Rob Cowen's account of a journey on foot fragments - startlingly - into history, fiction, philosophical enquiry and fearless memoir. A beautifully woven and mesmerising book.’

Tom Bullough

‘A masterful weaving of time and place. The North Road offers a rare, strong blend of national and personal - sweeping, sensitive and enduring.’

Tristan Gooley

'I don’t know how he does it, but in combining deep history, travel, memoir, fiction and so much more besides, Rob Cowen has created something stunning and utterly unique. The North Road sits in a genre of one. He’s a wandering wizard, a magician whose brilliance lies not in trickery, but in real talent and a wild, untamed imagination that’s capable of transcending time.'

Benjamin Myers

'Rob Cowen weighs up the mighty A1 from the hard-packed solum beneath its pitch to the aerial maps by which so many steer its course. A deep time hymn to a mercurial trunk route that’s beckoned, blistered and borne travellers for centuries unknown, The North Road is by turns brilliant, questing and poignant. Equal parts ardent asphalt anthem and song to belonging, Cowen’s new book is a north/south tour de force.'

Dan Richards

‘I loved the combination of memoir, history, family story, the vivid fictional interludes. All the familiar places referenced along Rob Cowen’s journey made The North Road feel universal; many will get a similar resonance from it as I did. Rob has given the A1 an entirely new sense of life.’

Luke Turner

'A road, like a story, is never just that. Both have roots, tributaries, ancestors and consequences. From first step to surprise destination, The North Road is as layered and braided as the route it follows, and as brutal, beautiful and unique as a life. With his singular blend of research, personal exploration and intensely visceral storytelling, Rob Cowen is truly in a class of his own.'

Amy-Jane Beer

'Rob Cowen is an enchanter, and he has conjured up a classic with this extraordinary, multi-layered knockout of a book. The North Road asks all the big questions – identity, history, memory, belonging – and offers riffs and responses that are both personal and universal, never glib, always beguiling.'

Dr Sharon Blackie

'Through Cowen’s engrossing, original narrative, this Roman road proves to be anything but straightforward. In revealing buried pasts, glancing the uncanny, and exhuming the strata of both personal and national identity, Cowen explores the question of our final destination: ‘What will remain?’ Reading this is a revelation.'

Jade Angeles Fitton

‘Rob Cowen brings a highway to living sentient life, from nowhere to everywhere in this elegant, moving mind-map of a storied road.’

Philip Hoare

‘When I began this book, I wondered if it would be for me. I didn’t think I was interested in roads. But The North Road is a wonderful, epic braiding of history, geography and personal memoir. It made me think deeply about who we are, and where we came from; our country in this moment in time, and how we can learn from our past. I couldn’t put it down.'

James Rebanks

‘I've just finished The North Road and it was stunning, weaving an intricate tapestry of tarmac, humanity and time, as rich as the dark earth on which his many threads lie. It will stay with me.’

Raynor Winn

‘Epic, magisterial, hard-won, properly-wrought - much like the Great North Road itself. Truly, a tour de force...you may read another book in 2025, you will not read a better one.’

John Lewis-Stempel

‘Masterful. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.’

John Mitchinson

‘A deep and richly satisfying, mind bending exploration of space, place and memory. I loved the many, many colourful layers of The North Road.’

Clover Stroud

‘This book will have you tripping on England. Rob Cowen has made the great portrait of the A1, 'the main road' par excellence. His text is a glimmering cocktail of memory and diachronic history, a plait of three enchanted cords - the ancient highway itself, the life of the land, and Cowen's personal story.’

Damian Le Bas

‘An extraordinary, beautifully realised road trip. Here, a road is a tributaried river, created and recreated by ourselves, our ghosts, doubles and echoes, and told as the story of us in the connections and coincidences a road engenders. This poetic, poignant and lyrically political book, throws up more mysteries than it answers, as the best literature does - and leaves us wanting more.’

Nicola Chester

‘The North Road utterly took my breath away. This genre-bending book is both lyrical and gritty, blending fiction and non-fiction. It signifies literal and metaphorical journeys: of personal evolution, the movement through time, freedom and escape, the unpredictability of life, breaking societal constraints, and connecting people, places, and ideas. Deeply researched and exquisitely poetic.’

Kathryn Aalto

‘Full of unexpected diversions and detours - just like the great road itself - Rob Cowen’s The North Road takes us on a fascinating, multi-layered journey through history, place, and personal story. Brilliantly researched, beautifully written, profound, and utterly unique.’

Brigit Strawbridge Howard

'An intensely personal journey and an intimate insight into one of Britain's most notorious and ancient roads.'

Lara Maiklem

‘A true epic of the road, tapping the spine of a country and its submerged culture. Hard miles experienced, endured, transformed.’

Iain Sinclair

'This is an astonishing book in its scope and vitality. It’s one to relish and revisit – not least because at its heart is an exuberant love song to both the living and the dead.'

The Telegraph

‘A remarkable, post-Covid, post-Brexit state of the nation literary archaeology… The North Road is many books in one, and a triumph in all its facets: a journey undertaken; an embodied metaphor of a road well-travelled; a painfully honest memoir of resilience and survival; and a moving account of the powerful legacy and overwhelming wonder of the family. Cowen thinks as a punk and writes as a poet in prose that goes from lyrical to dark to frightening and hopeful, often on the same page. A book about a road that embraces history and memoir, it never descends into cliché, but reminds us that whatever our mistakes we "can alter the path and try another road", both as individuals and as a nation. It is a book that made me laugh and cry out loud; it made me think about myself, and about what it is to be alive here, now, in 21st-century Britain: what else could you ask of a great book?’

Financial Times

‘richly historical … The North Road is a wonderful achievement …. Cowen has perhaps found his country's elusive sense of identity. It resides not in landscape or football or a National Trust garden, but in an ever-changing, ever-active, thundering dual carriageway. It begins in uncertainty and ends in a different nation. Brilliantly, The North Road is everything. It is "England and nowhere".’

Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman

'A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movie.'

Observer