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The North Road
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  • Published: 17 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804956106
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $50.00
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The North Road

Formats & editions
EBook
17 Apr 2025
Audiobook
17 Apr 2025
Hardback
17 May 2025
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The highly anticipated major new work from the acclaimed author of Common Ground

‘Radical and beautiful. Haunted and haunting: Cowen tracks the London-Edinburgh highway […] A dazzlingly inventive work of literature.’ Robert Macfarlane

At the heart of this book is a highway. The A1; The Great North Road. A 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the last 2,000 years. In this genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time. Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves. Written in kaleidoscopic prose, The North Road is an unforgettable exploration of Britain’s great highway.
  • Published: 17 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804956106
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $50.00
Categories:

About the author

Rob Cowen

Rob Cowen is an award-winning writer and author. His 2012 debut Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild won the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors. His second book, Common Ground (2015), has been hailed as a seminal and genre-defying work redefining writing on people and place. Common Ground was voted third in a 2018 poll to find Britain’s favourite nature book of all time, a ‘Book of the Year’ in The Times, The Express and The Independent, and ‘Top Ten Readers’ Choice’ in The Guardian. It was also shortlisted for the Wainwright, Portico and Richard Jefferies Society prizes. Previously a nature and travel columnist at The Independent, Rob has contributed to the New York Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph and written essays and radio programmes for the BBC. His poetry and prose have featured in various journals and books. He lives in North Yorkshire.

portrait photo of Rob Cowen

Also by Rob Cowen

Common Ground
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Praise for The North Road

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.

GUARDIAN

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".

NEW STATESMAN
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