Walking Home - Hardcover

'Armitage has the rare gift of making his readers laugh out loud, as well as being surely the only poet to ever persuade the patrons of pubs and village halls from Scotland to Derbyshire to cram a total of £3,086.42 into a clean sock during 16 days' worth of poetic performance. But it is in moments of doubt, anxiety, cowardice and black misery that his book is at its most touchingly human. Like Odysseus and Sir Gawain, his is a flawed journey, with an untriumphant ending. But he does it. He goes home.' -- Telegraph

'Armitage has always been a wonderfully fluent writer, able to riff on almost any subject in either prose or poetry ... The result is a homage to an oddly old-fashioned Britain, full of glorious eccentrics and hearts of gold, but vividly believable for all that.' --Financial Times

'On the face of it, everything sounds rather plain, an old-fashioned world of packed lunches, mint cake and OS maps flapping in the wind, and also rather domestic ... But Walking Home is much more than this suggests. Armitage's great gift is his voice. He is able to make his walk talk as he does and I have never read a more fully inhabited book of walking. It is funny but moving, quiet but strong' -- Observer

'Armitage's journey is more pedestrian; a manageable distance along a worn path through familiar faces. But it's exactly those things which make this book so lovely. There are a thousand blogs out there offering accounts of walking everything from the Mongolian Steppes to Deptford High Street, all of them filled with exclamation marks and epiphanies, and all of them completely unreadable. But Armitage's account is so observant, so funny and so intensely likable you leave it wishing he'd picked a longer route. The dialogue is note-perfect and the jokes alone are worth the journey. And at the end of it all, Armitage has achieved far more than his stated ambition. Walking Home tells us not just about the bones of Britain, but about connections still to be forged between people and print, and the everlasting power of an open heart.' -- Sunday Telegraph

'Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way back to his birthplace, like a troubadour, like a tramp, like a human camera who turned what he saw on the way into words. A wonderful book.' --Jeanette Winterson, The Times Books of the Year

'[Armitage's] memoir of rough landscape, wild weather, poetic lore and modern country and small town life is richly evocative of his Northern character.' --The Times, Summer Books Roundup

'This is a hugely enjoyable and at times very funny book ... At every turn along the way he teases out such a series of jokey little scenes, reminiscences and observations that it is hard to read a single page without a chuckle ... Along the way we have the crisp and deadpan phrasing familiar from his poems ... It's all very gentle and self-deprecating with the ups and downs of the path, the weather and his moods. He is good company on the page ... And once or twice, from behind the jocular banter; comes a glimpse of the more serious poet, with heartfelt reflections on George Mackay Brown, the Odyssey and Sir Gawain And The Green Knight ... Walking Home can be added to his other engaging memoirs All Points North and Gig ... He is diligent, prolific and wide-ranging. By balancing humour and gravitas, he generates great affection in his readers. If he is not careful, Simon Armitage will end up becoming a national treasure.' -- Mail on Sunday

'Armitage has the rare gift of making his readers laugh out loud, as well as being surely the only poet to ever persuade the patrons of pubs and village halls from Scotland to Derbyshire to cram a total of £3,086.42 into a clean sock during 16 days' worth of poetic performance. But it is in moments of doubt, anxiety, cowardice and black misery that his book is at its most touchingly human. Like Odysseus and Sir Gawain, his is a flawed journey, with an untriumphant ending. But he does it. He goes home.' -- Telegraph

'Armitage has always been a wonderfully fluent writer, able to riff on almost any subject in either prose or poetry ... The result is a homage to an oddly old-fashioned Britain, full of glorious eccentrics and hearts of gold, but vividly believable for all that.' --Financial Times

'On the face of it, everything sounds rather plain, an old-fashioned world of packed lunches, mint cake and OS maps flapping in the wind, and also rather domestic ... But Walking Home is much more than this suggests. Armitage's great gift is his voice. He is able to make his walk talk as he does and I have never read a more fully inhabited book of walking. It is funny but moving, quiet but strong' -- Observer

'Armitage's journey is more pedestrian; a manageable distance along a worn path through familiar faces. But it's exactly those things which make this book so lovely. There are a thousand blogs out there offering accounts of walking everything from the Mongolian Steppes to Deptford High Street, all of them filled with exclamation marks and epiphanies, and all of them completely unreadable. But Armitage's account is so observant, so funny and so intensely likable you leave it wishing he'd picked a longer route. The dialogue is note-perfect and the jokes alone are worth the journey. And at the end of it all, Armitage has achieved far more than his stated ambition. Walking Home tells us not just about the bones of Britain, but about connections still to be forged between people and print, and the everlasting power of an open heart.' -- Sunday Telegraph

'[Armitage's] memoir of rough landscape, wild weather, poetic lore and modern country and small town life is richly evocative of his Northern character.' --The Times, Summer Books Roundup

In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards theYorkshire village where he was born.

Travelling as a 'modern troubadour' without a penny in his pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep.

WALKING HOME describes this extraordinary, yet ordinary, journey. It's a story about Britain's remote and overlooked interior - the wildness of its landscape and the generosity of the locals who sustained him on his journey. It's about facing emotional and physical challenges, and sometimes overcoming them. It's nature writing, but with people at its heart. Contemplative, moving and droll, it is a unique narrative from one of our most beloved writers.