DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Now All Roads Lead to France

The Last Years of Edward Thomas

Matthew Hollis author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Faber & Faber

Published:5th Jan '12

Should be back in stock very soon

Now All Roads Lead to France cover

Now All Roads Lead to France is celebrated poet Matthew Hollis's fascinating exploration of one of Britain's most influential First World War poets.

Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old.

It is these roads taken - and those not taken - that are at the heart of this remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas's tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas's fatal decision to fight in the war.

The book also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke were 'making it new' - vehemently and pugnaciously.

These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented by his work and his marriage. But as his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century. Their writing was far more than just war poetry, but it was World War I that put an ocean between them. Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old.

It is these roads taken - and those not taken - that are at the heart of this remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas's tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.

  • Winner of Costa Biography Award 2011

ISBN: 9780571245994

Dimensions: 233mm x 156mm x 17mm

Weight: 215g

416 pages

Main