The Marches
From the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Politics on the Edge and co-host of The Rest Is Politics.
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Publisher Description
THE NO. 1 BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF POLITICS ON THE EDGE
Combining memoir, history and travel writing, a moving exploration of landscape, identity and the love between a father and son.
Rory Stewart and his father set out on their final walk together along the border between England and Scotland.
On their 600-mile thirty-day journey, the pair relive Scottish dances, talk about Burmese honey bears and the loss of human presence in the countryside around them. Their odyssey develops into story of nationhood and landscape, and an exuberant encounter between father and son. Written with pathos and wit, Stewart’s memoir is a moving, honest and loving portrait of his father and homeland.
‘Travel writing at its best’ Observer
‘Beautifully written… a haunting reflection of identity and our relationships with the people and places we love’ Daily Mail
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The blurry geographic and cultural line between regions that have been (and might someday be) separate nations is explored in this ruminative travelogue. Stewart, an Englishman who grew up partly in Scotland and represents an English border district in Parliament, follows The Places In Between, his 2006 account of trekking across Afghanistan by foot, with this narrative of walking trips through English-Scottish border areas. Musing on the nature of frontiers, he ponders Hadrian's Wall marking Roman Britain off from the barbarian north; the Northumbrian lands where medieval Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse settlers uneasily coexisted; cross-border feuds that inspired Walter Scott's romances; and the separatist impulses surrounding the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. He also paints vivid portraits of the region's rich (though sodden) landscapes, and trenchantly critiques environment policies that try to return the human-scaled "living countryside" of 1,000-year-old grazing and farming terrain to wild bog and forest for the sake of biodiversity and carbon sinks. Stewart anchors his lively mix of history, travelogue, and reportage on local communities in a vibrant portrait of his father, who was both a tartan-wearing Scotsman and a thoroughly British soldier and diplomat. This is a subtle, clear-eyed, ardent case for the United Kingdom's future, one that recognizes cross-border divisions but deeply values ties that bind.
