New York To California

Novelist, traveller, scriptwriter, photographer: Jeremy Page is a man with a broad view of wide horizons. But on approaching middle age, he experienced a calling to return to the place which he - and his ancestors - had called home. Like the migratory eel, retracing a route back to somewhere it had once fought to leave, he decided to take a long, slow journey through a landscape both familiar but also separated by time and distance from his current life. Starting in the tiny Lincolnshire fen-village of New York, Page sets off with an eccentric companion and a dog, following a similar path to his forebears - through fenland, along coastlines, into cities and across broads. His destination: another village with an improbable stateside name - California - on the East Norfolk coast. Whilst never entirely clear what he is searching for, he hopes answers might emerge amongst the not-quite-visible-parts of the landscape and its people. With great humour and beautiful observation, he paints a poignant, joyous portrait of what it means to stop and contemplate who we are, where we came from, and where we might be heading. Concrete answers are not what he he finds, but glimmers of the nearly-hidden provide tantalising clues that both he and his readers will benefit from having experienced long after the journey ends.