The North Road

Road is the epic and haunting story of Cowen's journey by foot along the A1 / Great North Road, from its beginning to its end. Cowen walks the road to come to terms with a past that still influences his present, uncovering as he does his own surprising connections to this ancient, shape-shifting highway. As he travels, the road reveals itself to be more than it seems: a seam of collective consciousness and repository of memory far deeper than it is wide. Road explores a 400-mile timeline through history, revealing the stories that roll back and forth beneath its tarmac like a novel without end.

Road tells the story of modern Britain while questioning the histories we take as fact, unpacking a nation's - and a family's - origin myths. Along the way the asphalt cracks to expose a preternatural space, a realm between and beyond people, place and nature. Time scatters, shifts and settles. Traces, relics and stories, usually blurred by speed, reveal themselves; a multiplicity of voices, normally drowned out by the acoustic monotony of traffic, whisper in the ear.

Against the backdrop of Brexit, fragmenting relationships and new economic, climatic and social realities, Road asks three key questions of our age: Who are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? In beautiful and unflinching prose, it seeks to find answers, creating an electrifying, intricately patterned portrait of a country and a person trying to find the road home. Road is a book about time, place, history and memory; it is also a book of profound personal revelation written in dazzling and raw prose