BOWIELAND

<p><b>''Fabulous... What a ghost story! A ripping read.'' IAIN SINCLAIR, author of <i>London Orbital</i></b><br><br><b>''Vividly celebrates Bowie as not just a chameleonic visionary, but a nomadic one, a creature informed by place and circumstance.'' STUART MACONIE</b><br><b><br><i>''Bowieland </i>will make you want to take your very own pilgrimage, accompanied by the great man''s songs.'' ALEXANDER LARMAN, <i>THE OBSERVER</i></b><br><b><br>''A sublime, time-travelling quest.'' TIFFANY MURRAY, author of <i>My Family and Other Rock Stars</i></b><br><b><br>''A joyful and fascinating journey which anchors Bowie''s genius in the pavements.'' KEVIN LOADER, producer of <i>The Buddha of Suburbia<br><br></i></b><b>BOWIE IS STILL OUT THERE...</b><br><br>Following open heart surgery, Peter Carpenter was given one instruction - walk if you want to stay alive. So, when his hero died in 2016, he knew what he had to do. The figure who was to so many a companion and guide had left no single focal point for homage. To reconnect with him, Carpenter would take a walk into the past, to the places where David Jones became something more: David Bowie.<br><br>Leaving behind well-known shrines to Bowie, he journeyed through South London edgelands to obscurer haunts. Carpenter''s quest, a series of happy accidents and chance meetings, took him to Bickley as well as Berlin and Brixton, to Eel Pie Island as well as Heddon Street and Beckenham.<br><br>Carpenter''s perambulations echo Bowie''s own wandering creative spirit. They reveal multiple influences, both conscious and unconscious, in Bowie''s creative development. Ultimately, Carpenter reaches a fresh understanding of where Bowie sits in the culture, not as an outlier, but as part of a tradition, informed by those artists, poets and musicians who passed on their wisdom to him. A celebration of the revelatory powers of walking, and by no means just for Bowie obsessives, BOWIELAND opens up our geography in ways rarely seen or so well understood.</p>