The Burning Leg

'I am looking for something more mysterious. For the path you read about in books, the old lane choked with undergrowth, whose entrance the weary prince could not discover.' - Alan Fournier Walkers, like lovers of literature, are driven by the urge to explore, and writers have blessed their fictional characters with itchy feet since the earliest of narratives. Milton's Adam and Eve leaving Eden, Mrs Yeobright's maternal anxiety spurring her across country in Hardy's The Return of the Native, militant miners in Zola's Germinal. Walks found in novels, short stories and even drama can have a multitude of meanings. Editor Duncan Minshull here forges a bold path through the greatest of the world's literature, collecting extracts from Dickens and Dostoevsky, Proust and Poe, Kipling, Kafka and many more to show imaginations time and again set in motion by the simple act of walking.