Thoughtlines

This is a book is about walking and writing; about walkers who wrote, and writers who walk. And because it is a book about walking and writing it is also a book about thinking, the circuit that exists between mind and feet, and about moving through a landscape that can be both physically in front of you, and exist in a line of words or the flight of a line of thought. And since all this walking and writing and thinking must have somewhere to take place, it is also a book about Suffolk, where I come from as a writer. So it also has a something in it of the journal, the writer's notebook; a little of the memoir and a little of the love-letter. You might call it the literary biography of a landscape. You may follow the walks on foot, with this book in your backpack perhaps, for those moments when walking must give way to reading, or you can follow them from within the deep comfort of a favourite armchair. You will travel in it from west to east, from chalk plain to crag; from velvety farmlands muffled by leaves to deafening shingle and uncompromising sea. You will be in excellent company - the walkers who will join you along the way range from Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson to Patricia Highsmith, Maggie Hemingway, Rebecca Solnit and Noreen Masud. They will include the poets George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Algernon Swinburne, Stevie Smith and Blake Morrison; the literary greats Wilkie Collins, George Orwell and W. G. Sebald, who found a new native land here; and those born to it, such as M. R. James and Edward Fitzgerald. All have their own thoughts, their own connections and reflections to add to the conversation. Let us walk.