Canongate buys Francis' The Bridge Between Worlds

Canongate has bought The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection by award-winning author and GP Gavin Francis, to be published in September 2024. 

Francis Bickmore purchased world rights from Jenny Brown of Jenny Brown Associates. 

The book explores the impact of bridges, both actual and metaphorical, in uniting and dividing us, taking history, geopolitics, literature and psychology in its stride. It reflects on human connections, both individual and national, and explores the communities on either side of these literal and emblematic structures. 

It will be Francis’ seventh non-fiction title. It follows Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession which will be published for the first time in paperback in August 2024, alongside a republication of his debut, True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, in Canongate’s modern classics list, The Canons. 

Francis said: “I’ve been thinking about the themes of this book since I first learned to read with The Ladybird Book of Bridges. Each chapter is a bridge, and each bridge is a doorway into exploring the beauty and restless energy of humanity’s love of connections, but also its fear of them, all around the globe. It’s also a 40-year memoir of travel, and I couldn’t be happier that it will be published by the world-class team at Canongate, alongside True North and Island Dreams.” 

Bickmore said: “One of the gifts of Gavin Francis’ brilliantly panoptic brain is to allow his readers to explore the world’s lands and geopolitics with him from the comfort of their armchairs. This fascinating book is the culmination of four decades of travel and explores what it has meant to our civilisation to build bridges and the price we pay when we tear them down.” 

Brown says: “We couldn’t be happier that Canongate is becoming the home of Gavin’s travel writing. His reputation as one of the finest writers in the genre will be further cemented with the publication of this remarkable book, alongside the paperback of Island Dreams, and a new edition of his debut True North: Travels in Arctic Europe as a Canongate Canon, 17 years after its first publication.”