The Crossway

Guy Stagg

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The Crossway won the Edward Stanley Travel Memoir of the Year 2019 and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award 2019. In 2013 Guy Stagg walked from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the pilgrimage after suffering several years of mental illness, hoping the ritual would heal him. For ten months he hiked alone on ancient paths, crossing ten countries and more than 5,500 kilometres. Travelling without support, he had to rely each night on the charity of strangers. The Crossway is an account of Stagg's extraordinary journey. It describes the dangers he faced on the road, captures the people he met and the landscapes he experienced, offers a unique insight into contemporary faith, and – most movingly – lays bare his struggle to escape the past and walk towards recovery.