Middleland

Dispatches from the Borders

Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as MP for Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border, living among Cumbria’s fells, farms and ancient frontiers.

Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is both a love letter to rural Britain – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local needs and national demands – and a quietly radical exploration of how politics might better serve the people it represents.

Rory Stewart has written a remarkable book about community and countryside, his community, his countryside. It is both telling and tender. He is treading in the footsteps of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas in his understanding of our need to belong and to contribute. A rare and life-affirming story of searching and finding our place to be and to cherish.

Michael Morpurgo

About Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart lived in and around the Eden Valley of Cumbria for ten years, serving as the Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border. He is half Scottish and half English. He is the author of several prize-winning and bestselling books including The Places in Between, a New York Times bestseller, and, most recently, Politics On the Edge, a no. 1 Sunday Times bestseller. Stewart is currently Brady-Johnson Professor of the Practice of Grand Strategy at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the co-host of the leading UK podcast The Rest Is Politics.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • ISBN: 9781529971644
  • Length: 352 pages
  • Price: £12.99