Europe was full of wanderers
and sickness: men who’d tracked
the Grail roads and found only wastes
and dark versions of themselves.

Longbarrow Press is proud to announce the publication of The Grail Roads, Rob Hindle‘s third full-length collection.

The Grail Roads reimagines the ‘quest’ of Galahad, Gawain, and other knights of Arthurian legend, displaced from their familiar mythology and recast as British soldiers on the Western Front. As the war turns attritional, the vision of the Grail darkens; one by one, the men are gathered into a dream of ‘a first and final home’ beyond the wrecked landscapes.

A beautifully produced 144-page hardback, The Grail Roads is available now from Longbarrow Press. You can read a poem from the book here; visit the Grail Roads microsite here; and order it by clicking on the relevant PayPal link below (major debit cards accepted – no PayPal account required):

The Grail Roads
£12.99 (hardback)

UK orders (+  £1.85 postage)

Europe orders (+ £5 postage)

Rest of World orders (+ £7 postage)

All orders are carefully parcelled in robust packaging and will be despatched within 24 hours.

‘ I look at the maps from 1914, 1916, 1917. The villages disappeared but the red lines were more or less the same. Men came up that road, year after year, and were killed. When it was finished people came back, rebuilt their houses, planted trees, ploughed the land again. Around Ypres, over the border in Belgium, farmers call it the Iron Harvest. Each year their ploughs uncover munitions, barbed wire, remnants of rifles. Sometimes the flotsam of older conflicts turns up – lead and iron from the Napoleonic Wars and the Hundred Years’ War.’  In a new post for the Longbarrow Blog, Rob Hindle reflects on nationalism, empire, myth and the ‘cultural archaeology’ of The Grail Roads. Click here to read ‘The Iron Harvest’.

Images:
1. Emma Bolland
2. Rob Hindle