The Crossway
14 June 2018Imprint: Picador
Synopsis
Winner - Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019.
Shortlisted - Rathbones Folio Prize, RSL Ondaatje Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award 2019.
In 2013 Guy Stagg made a pilgrimage from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the journey after suffering several years of mental illness, hoping the ritual would heal him. For ten months he hiked alone on ancient...
Details
14 June 2018400 pages
9781509844579Imprint: Picador
Reviews
The Crossway is in many ways classic travelogue, so classic indeed that early admirers have drawn parallels with Patrick Leigh Fermor. Stagg certainly has a way with words . . . But in addition – and unlike the rather stiff-upper-lipped Leigh Fermor – Stagg allows an emotional honesty to filter through the golden prose . . . a luminous and occasionally (almost in spite of itself) numinous account . . . moving and thought-provokingPeter Stanford, Observer
Having finished this account, I felt dazed. Dazed at the thought of all that I’d learnt from its pages about 2,000 years of Christianity, dazed at how immediate its author had made so many centuries-old stories feel, and dazed at the strangeness and brilliance of this extraordinary travelogue.Rebecca Armstrong, i newspaper
The journey as redemptive recovery is a well-worm trope, but there is no glib ending here. I really enjoyed this book.Sara Wheeler, Spectator
Such pitch-perfect prose that he has already attracted comparisons with Patrick Leigh Fermor’s celebrated accounts of his youthful travelsThe Tablet
