Where My Feet Fall

The Independent Best Book for Walkers 2022

Where can a walk take you?

It goes without saying, walking can connect us to our surroundings and free us from our worries. It can raise our heart rate and relax our minds. It can lead us across historic ground and inspire new thinking.

In this beautiful collection, twenty outstanding writers set out with old memories and new adventures. ‘I’ve always hated walking,’ Harland Miller offers as his precis, while Ingrid Persaud and Agnes Poirier consider the rituals of pilgrimage and protest march. ‘It isn’t a walking city,’ Kamila Shamsie writes of Karachi, though she strides across it regardless. On the shores of Foulness Island, Will Self hopes to avoid landmines. In a forest north of Berlin, Jessica J. Lee gets soaked, then lost. And pacing around Delhi, Keshava Guha is interrupted by a husky. ‘During the pandemic of 2020,’ he writes, looking back. ‘He was the only thing I hugged.’

These are stories to dip into, from all walks of life. Together they capture the magic and opportunity that can arrive when you put one foot in front of the other.

This collection features Tim Parks, Kamila Shamsie, Will Self, Nicholas Shakespeare, Irenosen Okojie, Ingrid Persaud, AL Kennedy, Cynan Jones, Sally Bayley, Joanna Kavenna, Kathleen Rooney, Richard Ford, Harland Miller, Keshava Guha, Agnès Poirier, Josephine Rowe, Sinead Gleeson, Pico Iyer, Patrick Gale and Jessica J. Lee.

Reviews

Praise for WHERE MY FEET FALL

The Independent Best Book for Walker 2022

‘If you think great travel writing is all about moving through places in another person’s shoes, then you need this collection of essays from 20 writers about the pleasure of putting one foot in front of another. From bustling walks through Karachi with Kamila Shamsie, to rain-soaked treks in Germany with Jessica J Lee, every entry comes with its own unique flavour and makes you realise that this most rudimentary form of transport can be one of the most evocative. Editor Duncan Minshull, who pulled the collection together, has written three books about walking, so he knows a thing or two about it’
Helen Coffey, Independent

‘A new collection of essays both sprightly and ruminative.. exploring the delights – and the challenges – of the placing of one foot in front of the other. . . Where My Feet Fall features such appropriately sturdy literary names, among them Richard Ford, Kamila Shamsie and Patrick Gale . . . Reading about walking in Where My Feet Fall allows you to inhabit the walker's imagination fully – surely the ultimate in armchair travel’
Hephzibah Anderson, Observer

‘This wonderful new anthology about walking and creative thinking’
Inside A Mountain, Charlie Lee Potter

‘A beautiful book’
Walk The Pod, Rachel Wheeley

‘Another great book by the writer and editor now established as the go-to authority on walking. His latest is a collection of twenty thoughtful essays… twenty strolls around the imaginations of some great writers’
Chris Paling, author of After The Raid and A Very Nice Rejection Letter