Now All Roads Lead to France

Now All Roads Lead to France chronicles the final five years of Edward Thomas, perhaps the most beguiling and influential of the First World War poets. This account centres on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas's fateful decision to fight in the war.

The book also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new and ambitious forms of writing. A generation of writers, including W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Rupert Brooke, were fervently engaged in 'making it new'.

These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented by his work and his marriage. However, as his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional burden began to lift. In 1914, the two friends developed ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verses of the twentieth century. Yet, the War placed an ocean between them: Frost returned to the safety of New England, while Thomas chose to fight for the Old.

It is these roads taken — and those not taken — that lie at the heart of this remarkable book, culminating in Thomas's tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.