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Rob Cowen is an award-winning writer and author, hailed as one of the UK's most original voices on nature, place and people. His first book, Skimming Stones, won the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors. His second book, Common Ground (PRH; 2015) was shortlisted for the Portico, Richard Jefferies Society and Wainwright Prizes and voted one of the nation's favourite nature books of all time in a BBC poll. His follow-up, The Heeding (E&T; 2021), was the best-selling debut book of poetry in 2021. Rob has contributed to the New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent and written radio programmes for the BBC. He lives in North Yorkshire.
‘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 * ‘When I began this book, I wondered if it would be for me. I didn’t think I was interested in roads, but then I couldn’t put it down. The North Road is a wonderful and epic braiding of history and 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 similar fractious moments in our past.’ * 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 * '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 * '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 * ‘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 * ‘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 * '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 * ‘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 * ‘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 *
