The Escape Artist: Life from the Saddle

(Paperback)

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Description

For a time there were four bikes in Matt Seaton's life, a training bike, a track bike, a mountain bike and a racing bike. His evenings were spent "doing the miles" on the roads between South London and the North Downs. Weekends were taken up with Club meetings, road races and time trials - rides that took him to cold village halls at dawn and out onto the empty bypasses of Southern England. Cycling had become a passion that bordered on possession. When he was in the saddle, real life remained at a comfortable distance. But this flight from responsibility could not last. Life came flooding in with his marriage to Ruth Picardie, the birth of their twins and Ruth's brutal illness. Today the bikes that remain are gathering dust on top of the road grime from their last rides, museum pieces of a life distantly remembered. "The Escape Artist" is at once a celebration of amateur sport, a social history of the bicycle, an honest account of adult responsibilities and a quiet hymn to the beauty of cycling for its own ends.

Reviews

* 'As poignant an elegy as I have ever read. I finished the last chapters of this book just before I went to sleep, and in the morning, with a swoop of grief in my guts, it was the first thing I thought of.' Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph * 'Thoroughly tragic and almost brilliant. The Escape Artist is an achingly sad account of what Seaton now refers to as 'my former life.' Robert MacFarlane, Observer * 'A heart-stopping examination of how, why and for what we push ourselves to the edge. I never thought I'd cry about bikes and cycling. It is one of those rare books you could give to absolutely anyone - and one you'll want to keep by you and read again and again.' Julie Myerson * 'This book is, above all, about passion and loss. It's about the passion of life at the very edge of athletic and mechanical achievement that is eventually lost to love of a wife and children, which in turn gives way to the loss of the wise and mother herself. I read and relished this book.' Jon Snow, Guardian

Author Bio

Matt Seaton was born in Brighton in 1965. He has written for numerous newspapers and magazines, and is currently a contributing editor to Esquire and the parents editor of the Guardian. He co-edited and contributed to Before I Say Goodbye (1998), a collection of writing by his late wife, the journalist Ruth Picardie, and others, and Two Wheels, a collection of his cycling journalism, was published in 2007. He has remarried and lives in London with his two children.