A Length of Road

Finding Myself in the Footsteps of John Clare: A John Murray Original

By: Robert Hamberger

Narrated by: Charles Armstrong, Jackie Wills, Robert Hamberger

A memoir about love and loss, fatherhood and masculinity, class and belonging.

In 1841, the 'peasant poet' John Clare escapes from an asylum in Epping Forest, where he had been kept for four years, and walks over 80 miles home to Northamptonshire. Suffering from poor mental health, Clare was attempting to return to his idealized first love, Mary, unaware that she had died three years earlier.

In 1995, with his life in crisis and his own mental health fragile, Robert decides to retrace Clare's route along the Great North Road over a punishing four-day walk. As he walks, he reflects on the changing landscape and on the evolving shape of his own family, on fatherhood and masculinity, and on the meaning of home.

Part memoir, part travel-writing, part literary criticism, A Length of Road is a deeply profound and poetic exploration of class, gender, grief and sexuality through the author's own experiences and through the autobiographical writing of poet John Clare.

©2021 Robert Hamberger (P)2021 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd