The new book about running, life, the history and landscape of Ireland, and so much more from the award-winning author of The Farmer's Son   It is summer, the hay and silage have not yet been made on John Connell’s farm, so he has time to indulge his other great passion: running. John sets off on a marathon run of 42.2 kilometers through his native Longford, the scene of his award-winning memoir. As he runs across woodlands, fields and tiny roads, he tells the story of his life and contemplates Ireland’s history, old and new. He also remembers other great runs he has done, in Australia and Canada, and tells the stories of some of his running heroes, such as Haile Gebrselassie. Part memoir, part essay, The Running Book explores what it is to be alive and what movement can do for a person. It is deeply intimate and wide-ranging, local and global: Connell is as likely to write about colonialism and the effect of British imperialism in Ireland and its former colonies as he is about life on his family farm in Ballinalee, County Longford. Told in 42 chapters, each another kilometer in the 42.2k race, the whole book is 42,000 words long and it captures what it is to undertake a marathon moment by moment, in body and mind. Above all, The Running Book is a book about the nature of happiness and how for one man it came through the feet. Some books are for runners, some are for history lovers. This charming volume is for both. It has made me vow to keep my eyes more widely open the next time I put my running shoes on – whether the ground beneath my feet is new or familiar. -- Adam Hochschild, author of  King Leopold’s Ghost "In this slim volume, Connell offers a lovely testimonial to all the seeing to be done by eyes and hearts that hold themselves open. And he shows us that, wherever we run, the world remains with us, to be grasped in all its grief and majesty". -- Zia Haider Rahman, author of  In The Light of What We Know "British colonialism is a topic that demands coverage and I am glad that Mr Connell is approaching it from this new lens". -- Shashi Tharoor, author of  Inglorious Empire "Sensational! John Connell has done it again" -- Dean Karnazes, author, Ultramarathon Man “A gorgeous evocation of farm life’s recurring cycle of births, deaths, seasons, weather, chores and life lessons, all spun into a lovely web of stories illuminated by crystalline prose. What comes through on every page is Mr. Connell’s heart and humility—and his profound appreciation for the animals who depend on him for their well-being, and vice versa.” – The Wall Street Journal on The Farmer's Son " The Farmer’s Son  echoes Aldo Leopold’s articulation of the land ethic, Michael Pollan’s writing on the food chain, and Ivan Doig’s plain-language music. Admirers of these writers will celebrate the entrance of Connell’s strong and distinct voice." -- Booklist on The Farmer's Son John Connell ’s work has been published in Granta ’s New Irish Writing issue. His memoir The Farmer's Son: Calving Season on a Family Farm was a number one bestseller in Ireland and won the 2018 An Post Irish Book Award/Ireland AM Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year. He lives on his family farm, Birchview, in County Longford, Ireland. We are not alone in this post-colonial landscape, we have never been. It was on a run in America's heart of Arizona that I came face to face with a leader of the Navajo Native Americans and found something of ourselves reflected back. I had come to the Navajo reservation to run, for it is a sacred act here. The Navajo nation is a big place, as big as Ireland, it is a land of milk and honey where beautiful desert plains give way to rolling grasslands. It is a special land. It stands alone as one of the few tribal nations to regain its homeland during the American wars of conquest. Why it was that they and not say the Apache or the Sioux returned home is not so clear for all the great tribes fought as bravely as each other. The history of the American inland empire was founded on a lie, for its core principle of 'Manifest Destiny’ was the fiction of a newspaper editor. This destiny enshrined the right given by God to ‘overspread and possess the whole of the North American continent’. It was this credo that allowed for the ‘great experiment of liberty’ to occur: namely the wars of conquest on the ever-expanding frontier. So successful was the ideology of ‘Manifest Destiny’ that we can see it shape the Nazis’ Lebensraum theory some sixty years later. In both we see morally justified colonialism, in short, the act of dispossession devoid of guilt. That the Irish, too, took part in this experiment is not lost on me, for we were part of that great ride west. There was excitement in it for the people who went, but tragedy for the people who already lived there. Monument Valley is a sort of mecca in the nation. A temple of nature with its cathedral of vast monolithic rocks rushing through the red desert soil, it is a