Take a walk with Rob Cowen on a chilly February evening 

Snippet-common-ground.jpg

Extracts

Take a walk with Rob Cowen on a chilly February evening

Common Ground

One of Britain’s Favourite Nature Books as featured on BBC’s Winterwatch

Immersive, evocative and powerful, Common Ground is a unique evocation of how, over the course of one year, Rob Cowen discovered a common - though extraordinary - square mile of wood, meadow, hedge and river on the edge of his northern town.

One of the most original books of 2015.

Cracking… Vividly and movingly described… Cowen writes very well.

Absolutely mesmerising, utterly beautiful, utterly engrossing – it takes a lot for a book to give me goosebumps but this one did.

[A] multi-faceted, touched-by-genius exploration of a stretch of Harrogate wasteland.

Marks out Cowen as a new writer who is both entertaining and significant… Cowen’s descriptive writing is visceral and gripping… and his attention to colour is particularly striking.

Magical... Deeply original... a detailed nature study [and] a moving memoir... I became both intrigued and enchanted by this hybrid approach.

Highly poetic... like an archaeologist, Cowen unearths histories, natural life and decayed infrastructure in a small area bordering the River Nidd... Above all, Common Ground is about the transformative power of this unnoticed piece of land, if one can only stand and stare for long enough'

Sensitive, thoughtful and poetic. Rob Cowen rakes over a scrap of land with forensic care, leading us into a whole new way of looking at the world.

Marvellously moving, this thrilling book is as big as any I know. A deep-mined and lovingly made account of survival, endurance and natural resilience in our old and broken world ... Heart-stoppingly beautiful.

author of The Running Sky and Four Fields

It takes a special kind of writer to make magic from the everyday. Rob Cowen has created something extraordinary; a journey into the Northern dreamtime in starkly beautiful prose. Common Ground gives us a new perspective on familiar places; makes us think again about what we think we know of our world; helps us understand the links that bind us to our landscape, and, like Blake, makes us see Heaven in a wild flower.

Heartfelt, deep, beautiful and moving.

Formally brave, beautifully written; an intimate account of one of life’s great turning points, and a luminous, painstaking exploration of place.

Boldly imaginative… This is writing of the highest order… Deep, rich and alive in prose that bubbles up from the fetid loam and, as in the work of, say, John Clare, William Wordsworth or DH Lawrence, takes pleasure in every microscopic, fecund detail… What makes this book special is the author’s total immersion in his subject… [Cowen] is an outlier, a Northern voice, a set of eyes on the soil, and Common Ground is his outstanding addition to – and expansion of – the canon.

Beautiful. It’s refreshing to read a piece of place-writing that digs so deeply and tenderly into a marginal landscape, and which (strikingly) does so using a novelist’s tools as well as a nature writer’s.

Cowen's relationship with this morsel of land is intense and honest, and described in superb prose... Not only rich and strange, but also astonishing.

When Cowen thinks of himself as an owl or a butterfly or a fox caught in a snare the book lights up... leaping over the space between animal and human as though there were no difference between us.

Cowen is without doubt one of our best current writers on landscape, on a par with Roger Deakin, Richard Mabey and Robert MacFarlane

Wonderful … An eerie haunting book … rendered with hair-raising, almost hallucinogenic, lyricism. Cowen moves on through the seasons of the year and the creatures of the edge land, feeling, more than observing, how the improving circumstances of animal life mirror his own climb out of darkness.

Blending natural history with a novelistic approach, Cowen revives his connection to the evocative, mysterious power of the natural world.

Very beautiful indeed... [Cowen] has all the alliterative grace and fresh metaphors of a poet

[A] poetic memoir... This apparently scrappy and overlooked piece of wasteland - a tangle of wood, meadow, field and river - proves to be, under [Cowen's] forensic and magnifying gaze, brimming with riches.

He is engrossed by his landscape, enthralled by the minutiae and evokes the same fascination in the reader

ONE OF BRITAIN'S FAVOURITE NATURE BOOKS AS FEATURED ON BBC's WINTERWATCH 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2016 
 
'Bold and beautiful.' Robert Macfarlane 
 
'Sensitive, thoughtful and poetic ... leading us into a whole new way of looking at the world' Michael Palin 
 
'Touched by genius' John Lewis-Stempel 
 
'Absolutely mesmerizing, utterly beautiful and engrossing' Joanne Harris 
 
After moving from London to a new home in Yorkshire, and about to become a father for the first time, Rob Cowen finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Disoriented, hemmed in by winter and yearning for open space, he ventures out to a nearby edge-land: a pylon-slung tangle of wood, hedge, field, meadow and river that lies unclaimed and overlooked on the outskirts of town. 
 
Digging deeper into this lost landscape, he begins to uncover its many layers and lives – beast, bird, insect, plant and people – in kaleidoscopic detail. As the seasons change and the birth of his child draws closer, his transformative journey into the blurry space where human and nature meet becomes increasingly profound. In bringing this edge-land to life, Cowen offers both a both a unique portrait of people and place through time and an unforgettable exploration of the common ground we share with the natural world, the past and each other.

Rob Cowen

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.

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”.

'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.'

‘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”.’

'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.'

‘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.’

‘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.'

'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.'

'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.'

‘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.’

‘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?’

‘A masterful weaving of time and place. The North Road offers a rare, strong blend of national and personal - sweeping, sensitive and enduring.’

'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.'

'A road, like a story, is never just that. Both have roots, tributaries, ancestors and consequences. From first step to surprise destination, The North Road is as layered and braided as the route it follows, and as brutal, beautiful and unique as a life. With his singular blend of research, personal exploration and intensely visceral storytelling, Rob Cowen is truly in a class of his own.'

‘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.’

‘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.’

'Rob Cowen is an enchanter, and he has conjured up a classic with this extraordinary, multi-layered knockout of a book. The North Road asks all the big questions – identity, history, memory, belonging – and offers riffs and responses that are both personal and universal, never glib, always beguiling.'

‘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.’

‘Rob Cowen brings a highway to living sentient life, from nowhere to everywhere in this elegant, moving mind-map of a storied road.’

‘I loved the combination of memoir, history, family story, the vivid fictional interludes. All the familiar places referenced along Rob Cowen’s journey made The North Road feel universal; many will get a similar resonance from it as I did. Rob has given the A1 an entirely new sense of life.’

‘A deep and richly satisfying, mind bending exploration of space, place and memory. I loved the many, many colourful layers of The North Road.’

‘Masterful. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.’

'An intensely personal journey and an intimate insight into one of Britain's most notorious and ancient roads.'

‘A true epic of the road, tapping the spine of a country and its submerged culture. Hard miles experienced, endured, transformed.’

‘This book will have you tripping on England. Rob Cowen has made the great portrait of the A1, 'the main road' par excellence. His text is a glimmering cocktail of memory and diachronic history, a plait of three enchanted cords - the ancient highway itself, the life of the land, and Cowen's personal story.’

'Through Cowen’s engrossing, original narrative, this Roman road proves to be anything but straightforward. In revealing buried pasts, glancing the uncanny, and exhuming the strata of both personal and national identity, Cowen explores the question of our final destination: ‘What will remain?’ Reading this is a revelation.'

‘An extraordinary, beautifully realised road trip. Here, a road is a tributaried river, created and recreated by ourselves, our ghosts, doubles and echoes, and told as the story of us in the connections and coincidences a road engenders. This poetic, poignant and lyrically political book, throws up more mysteries than it answers, as the best literature does - and leaves us wanting more.’

‘The North Road utterly took my breath away. This genre-bending book is both lyrical and gritty, blending fiction and non-fiction. It signifies literal and metaphorical journeys: of personal evolution, the movement through time, freedom and escape, the unpredictability of life, breaking societal constraints, and connecting people, places, and ideas. Deeply researched and exquisitely poetic.’

‘Full of unexpected diversions and detours - just like the great road itself - Rob Cowen’s The North Road takes us on a fascinating, multi-layered journey through history, place, and personal story. Brilliantly researched, beautifully written, profound, and utterly unique.’

LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2025 
 
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 
 
'A dazzlingly inventive work of literature' Robert Macfarlane 
'A wonderful achievement' Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman 
'Beautifully written' Observer 
'A wonderful, epic braiding of history, geography and memoir' James Rebanks 
 
At the heart of this book is a highway. The A1; The Great North Road. A 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the last 2,000 years. 
 
In this genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time. Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves. 
 
Written in kaleidoscopic prose, The North Road is an unforgettable exploration of Britain’s great highway. 
 
'Astonishing... One to relish and revisit' 
Telegraph 
 
'Remarkable' 
Financial Times 
 
'Sweeping, sensitive and enduring' 
Tristan Gooley 
 
'Stunning and utterly unique' 
Benjamin Myers 
 
'A dazzling, dogged, layered account of one road’s passage through place, time and an ordinary family’s history' 
Melissa Harrison

Rob Cowen

Praise for The North Road

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.

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 ...

'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.'

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.

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 ...

'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.'

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.

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 ...

'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.'

Books by Rob Cowen

Articles featuring Rob Cowen

Take a walk with Rob Cowen on a chilly February evening

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter