The North Road

'This is an astonishing book in its scope and vitality. It’s one to relish and revisit – not least because at its heart is an exuberant love song to both the living and the dead.' * The Telegraph *
‘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”.’ * Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman *
'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.' * Observer *
‘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 The North Road is a wonderful, epic braiding of history, 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 our past. I couldn’t put it down.' * 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 remarkable, post-Covid, post-Brexit state of the nation literary archaeology… The North Road is many books in one, and a triumph in all its facets: a journey undertaken; an embodied metaphor of a road well-travelled; a painfully honest memoir of resilience and survival; and a moving account of the powerful legacy and overwhelming wonder of the family. Cowen thinks as a punk and writes as a poet in prose that goes from lyrical to dark to frightening and hopeful, often on the same page. A book about a road that embraces history and memoir, it never descends into cliché, but reminds us that whatever our mistakes we “can alter the path and try another road”, both as individuals and as a nation. It is a book that made me laugh and cry out loud; it made me think about myself, and about what it is to be alive here, now, in 21st-century Britain: what else could you ask of a great book?’ * Financial Times *