'This is travel writing at its best.'
Katherine Norbury, Observer
An Observer Book of the Year
His father Brian taught Rory Stewart how to walk, and walked with him on journeys from Iran to Malaysia. Now they have chosen to do their final walk together along 'the Marches' — the frontier that divides their two countries, Scotland and England. Brian, a ninety-year-old former colonial official and intelligence officer, arrives in Newcastle from Scotland dressed in tartan and carrying a draft of his new book You Know More Chinese Than You Think. Rory comes from his home in the Lake District, carrying a Punjabi fighting stick which he used when walking across Afghanistan.
On their six-hundred-mile, thirty-day journey — with Rory on foot, and his father 'ambushing' him by car — the pair relive Scottish dances, reflect on Burmese honey-bears, and on the loss of human presence in the British landscape….
