Now All Roads Lead to France
​The Last Years of Edward Thomas

Faber and Faber
Hardback, 416pp., 9780571245987 (4 August 2011)
Ebook, B005CG8ICY (4 August 2011)
Paperback, 9780571245994 (5 January 2012)

​W. W. Norton
Hardback, 416pp, 9780393089073 (22 October 2012)

Winner of the Costa Biography Award
Winner of the H. W. Fisher Biography Award
Sunday Times Biography of the Year
BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week
Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction

Edward Thomas was the most beguiling of the poets who lost their lives in the First World War. More or less unread in his lifetime, his writing has had a powerful influence on poetry today. This haunting account of his final five years is centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas’s decision, in 1915, to enlist in the army and go to fight in France.

Now All Roads Lead to France is also an evocation of an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, a time when London was both the world capital for poets and a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. With the Victorian poets discredited, a younger generation that included W. B. Yeats, Rupert Brooke, Robert Frost and Ezra Pound were ‘making it new’ and quarrelling with ever increasing vehemence: Pound even challenged one of his ‘conservative’ peers to a duel.

These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure at first tormented by feelings of failure in his work and in his marriage. But friendship with Frost, when it blossomed in 1913, brought about an unimaginable change in Thomas. Under Frost’s encouragement Thomas began writing poem after poem and as he found a new sense of self-respect his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century. But the War put an ocean between them: Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old.
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It is these roads taken – and those not taken – that are at the heart of this unforgettable book, which culminates in Thomas’s tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.

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Reviews.

‘I read this book entranced, inspired, anxious and grateful and I finished it in tears. It is important and it is wonderful.’
— Carol Ann Duffy

‘Hollis’s fine book helps us to understand how much more there is to Thomas than willow-herb and meadowsweet and haycocks dry.’
— Robert Macfarlane, Guardian

‘An acute and unforgettably moving study of friendship and creativity.’
— Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times, Biography of the Year

‘Like Edward Thomas’s poetry, Now All Roads Lead to France is a work of careful, unobtrusive excellence, subtle insight and great emotional power.’
— Adam Foulds

‘Thoughtful and scrupulous book . . . A bravura critical performance.’
— John Carey, Sunday Times

‘Hollis movingly analyses these [poems] and writes heart-stoppingly . . . This is a brilliant and superbly written study by a writer, himself a poet, who understands his subject with acute but critical sympathy.’
— Nigel Jones, Sunday Telegraph, Book of the Week

‘Now All Roads Lead To France is a beautiful biography, an unfussy, clear-headed study of the making of a poet, and perhaps above all, a gentle reminder that poetry can be almost as essential to the human spirit as breathing.’
— Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday, Book of the Week

​‘Finally gives the poet’s poet among the dead of the Great War the measured and moving biographical treatment he deserves.’
— Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

Media.

In Pursuit of Edward Thomas, BBC Radio 4, Thursday 6 April 2017, 11.30am
The poet Edward Thomas died at the Battle of Arras one hundred years ago on 9th April 1917. He’d been a poet for little more than two years and his collected works amount to only a slim volume. Nevertheless he is regarded as among the greatest of English poets. What made him so? Poet and editor, Matthew Hollis, follows a journey Thomas made by bike in the spring of 1913 from London into south west England. It was a journey that produced a prose book for Thomas, In Pursuit of Spring, but it was also a journey that turned him towards poetry. Producer: Tim Dee.
To listen to the programme, broadcast on 6 April 2017, click here.

Adlestrop, 100 Years On, 24 June 2014
To listen to Matthew discussing Edward’s Thomas poem on BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub, click here.
To read Matthew’s account of the drafting of the poem, click here.
To follow The Poetry Society’s celebrations of the poem, click here.

BBC Radio 4, Bookclub, Sunday 3 November 2013, 4.00pm & Thursday 7 November 2013, 3.30pm
BBC Radio 4, Bookclub
with James Naughtie
Matthew Hollis discusses his Costa winning biography of the poet Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France.
To listen to the broadcast, click here.