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Common Ground: Around Britain in 30 Writers | 
 enlarge | Authors: John Simmons, Rob Williams, Tim Rich
Publisher: Cyan Books and Marshall Cavendish
Category: Book
List Price: £10.00
Buy New: £7.00
You Save: £3.00 (30%)
Media: Paperback
Pages: 321
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 1904879934
EAN: 9781904879930
ASIN: 1904879934
Publication Date: September 14, 2006
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Travel without leaving your armchair March 19, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I love books that take me somewhere I wasn't expecting to go. I also like personal recommendations about which authors to explore next. There are too many books to choose from (and so few of them represented in high street book shops) so it's lovely to have Penny Williams introducing me to the work of Bill Tilman (whom she met when she was ten years old) or Tim Rich make me want to order a copy of Hilaire Belloc's collected works. I'm also reading 'Lost in Music' by Giles Smith because Tom Wilcox was so passionate about it in his Common Ground chapter (which is so funny that you'd best not read it in public). As a northener moved south, I lapped up Roger Horberry's chapter on Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar and his own poignant tale of shifting from the top England to the bottom and back again.
With each chapter you never know what you're going to discover. Some are the kind of reviews you'd expect to read in literary supplements. Others are fiction. Still more explore territory which borders on performance art. Some tell fascinating personal stories. Each one gives you something new to consider. This is a book which makes me want to see more of Britain, reducing my carbon footprint and spending all my holidays taking the train to parts of my country that I've missed so far.
Perhaps it'll even encourage you to visit Middlesbrough, once you've read the chapter on FW Lister. (I wrote that one.)
Inspiring and very entertaining September 29, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
What a lovely book. The articles get across a really strong flavour of each author and place, so you end up knowing much more about 30 really interesting authors while reading 30 personal and entertaining articles. This book has inspired me to read all sorts of authors I'd never have thought of reading before, like Jasper Fforde, Alan Garner and Hilaire Belloc (look out for that, it's a great chapter).
Ali Smith writes a wonderful chapter on the folklorist and geologist Hugh Miller, who lived in Cromarty, and Niall Griffiths contributes a brilliant look at Dylan Thomas in Laugharne. There's a variety here too, so there are poets and novelists, but also pieces on the Tv writer paul Abbott who writes Shameless, Van Morrison, and Stuart Murdoch from the band Belle & Sebastian. There's also a great punky piece on being in a band in Essex. How nice to see such a breadth of writers featured, not just famous names. Even the chapters on the famous manage to take a fresh angle, so it looks at Dickens in Kent, John Milton's cottage in Buckinghamshire, and there's a witty look at modern 'Shakespeare's Stratford'. It would be lovely to see more books about literature like this.By combining the personal experiences of the writers with the works of the authors you learn a lot while being entertained and told some moving personal stories.
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