Why the hell are you doing this?

The North Road
ROB COWEN

(HUTCHINSON HEINEMANN, 432 PP, £22)
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Rob Cowen’s obsession began at an archaeological irony, a precious ancient site unearthed only because it was about to be tarmacked. Taking a turn at the dig of Bainesse, a roadside Roman settlement near Catterick where the planned route of the A1(M) unwittingly resumed an historic course, he uncovered a skull. He found himself contemplating the awful intersection between memory, mortality and the things we can hold and feel, while his fellow excavators went looking for sandwiches.

The experience melted his weeks-old writer’s block. And left him, weeks later, holding his infant son and trying not to cry, reproached by a whispering voice: “What will happen when all this falls apart?” Something a skull might ask.

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