Pies and Prejudice - In Search of the North

“Pie and Prejudice” is a charming, wise and witty travel book that takes place on our very own shores. A northerner in exile, stateless and confused and hearing rumours of Harvey Nichols in Leeds and Maseratis in Wilmslow, Stuart Maconie goes in search of the North. On a mission to discover where the clichés end and the truth begins, he travels from Wigan Pier to Blackpool Tower and from Bigg Market in Newcastle to the Lake District to find his own Northern Soul, encountering along the way an exotically British cast of Scousers, pie-eating woollybacks, topless Geordies, mad-for-it Mancs, Yorkshire nationalists and brothers in southern exile. Incredibly funny and at times startlingly realised, Maconie comes to terms with his place in the North he finds himself returning to, where he comes to realise just what he and his fellow Northern ‘exiles’ have become, or as he says: “We had become those kinds of people, the kind of people who had sun-dried tomatoes and cappuccino makers, the kind of people who did Sunday brunch. In other words: southerners”