Critiques en avant-première

Walkers, like lovers of literature, are driven by the urge to explore, and writers have blessed their fictional characters with itchy feet since the earliest of narratives. Milton’s Adam and Eve leaving Eden, Mrs Yeobright’s maternal anxiety spurring her across country in Hardy’s The Return of the Native, militant miners in Zola’s Germinal. Walks found in novels, short stories and even drama can have a multitude of meanings. Editor Duncan Minshull here forges a bold path through the greatest of the world’s literature, collecting extracts from Dickens and Dostoevsky, Proust and Poe, Kipling, Kafka and many more to show imaginations time and again set in motion by the simple act of walking.