Walking the Great North Line

Robert Twigger’s travelogues have always had a wonderful globetrotting sense of adventure. Here, he attempts something closer to home; walking the “line” that connects Stonehenge and Lindisfarne and other ancient landmarks… An extended ramble, literally, which becomes a consideration of life, family and the nature of beauty – Ben East * THE OBSERVER *There are some non-fiction books which are held together by the sheer force of the author’s personality alone. Robert Twigger’s new volume is one such. Its spine, both literally and metaphorically, is a walk from Christchurch in Dorset to the island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland, a more or less straight line at 1 degree 50 west along the major watershed of English rivers … His mind goes everywhere, but a certain levity and self-deprecating humour is marbled throughout it. Self-deprecation seems quintessentially English and somehow a Zen Buddhist loss of self at one and the same time here. I doubt there will be published a book so manic and pensive, so cheerful, so able to polish your eyes to see things anew (why are most houses built around right angles rather than circles?) – THE SCOTSMAN * Stuart Kelly *A fascinating meditation on ancient wisdom wrapped inside an adventure across modern Britain, this marvellously entertaining book offers a challenge to travel writing and a casket of treasures to readers * Nick Jubber, author of ‘Epic Continent’ *Twigger is an errant knight, who uncovers a hidden sense of England on his walk along this mystical route. A masterful conjuror of images and ideas, he can describe a blistered toe with the same enthusiasm he brings to the wistful call of the cuckoo. He turns his bright gaze on all manner of shamanic shapes and shifting ghosts in the land and reveals much about his own innermost thoughts on writing and the journey through life itself. This is a rare book with much wisdom spun around a seemingly well known set of places * Tim Ecott, author of ‘The Land of Maybe: A Faroe Islands Year’ *Robert Twigger is not so much a travel writer as a thrill-seeking philosopher * ESQUIRE *Rob Twigger is the perfect guide to the Great North Line. He is a vagabond seer in the tradition of Alfred Watkins: connecting the dots, glimpsing the past, anticipating the future. I loved it – Jon Day, author of ‘Homing’A bona fide media daredevil with brains and balls beyond the norm * DAILY TELEGRAPH *Twigger reminds us that the adventurous spirit of the British explorer is alive and well, and Voyageur is a fine addition to the genre * GUARDIAN *Twigger has found a narrative voice all too rare in contemporary travel writing: clear-eyed, unaffected, deadpan, slyly witty and unobtrusively erudite * MAIL ON SUNDAY *

ROBERT TWIGGER has won the Newdigate Prize for poetry, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award and the Somerset Maugham Award. His twelve books have been translated into over twenty languages and cover both fiction and non-fiction, memoir and travel. He spent a year training with the Tokyo riot police, crossed Canada in a homemade birchbark canoe and was the first person to traverse entirely on foot the Egyptian Great Sand Sea. His quarterly comic of memoir and travel, This Simple Life, is available.