HarperNorth acquires Maconie's 'insightful and far-reaching' book on Englishness

HarperNorth has snapped up The Full English: A Journey in Search of a Country and its People, an “insightful and far-reaching expedition into Englishness” by author of Pies and Prejudice (Ebury) Stuart Maconie. 

Jonathan de Peyer, senior commissioning editor, acquired world all languages from Kate Haldane at PBJ for HarperNorth. The book will publish in hardback, e-book and audio in April 2023. 

The publisher said: “Deftly weaving history and politics in engaging, conversational prose, The Full English is a love-letter to England written in Maconie’s inimitable style. Along the way we meet a rich cast of characters and delve into the seldom-explored crevices of our national psyche. 

“There have been classic portraits of a nation in turmoil before. Before Orwell there was Bradfordian polymath

J B Priestley, who travelled far and wide. Priestley’s English Journey is a warm, funny and tender forgotten classic. A huge and immediate success in its own time, it transcends its ’30s origins to speak to our troubled present: scathing about vested interests, intensely patriotic and politically progressive. 

“Now, 90 years on, Stuart Maconie undertakes his own inventory of the English and Englishness, with Priestley’s 30s itinerary as guide. How does the country look today, freshly unmoored from its European neighbours and still emerging blinking from the ice age of doubt and insecurity that was Covid? Re-energised? Hungry for change? Or moribund, dazed and desperate for old certainties?” 

De Peyer said: “Stuart Maconie wrote the book on the north of England, and Priestley himself was the biographer of the nation in his own time, so The Full English is a meeting of minds. It’s been such a pleasure to work with Stuart on a book that really cements him as the foremost observer of our country and people.  

Maconie added: “J B Priestley’s English Journey is perhaps the finest book ever written about England and the English. So you are walking in dauntingly large footsteps if you attempt to ’retread’ it. But in 2022 it seemed this was a book whose time had come. Again. The English are still as beautiful, exasperating, passionate, solid, divided, combative, warm, humane and funny as ever. But post-Brexit, post-pandemic, and in the midst of new and endless crises, this seemed to be the perfect moment to pack notebook, check train times and go and see what had changed, and what had stayed the same.” 

Publication will be supported by a national book tour and TV and radio appearances. HarperNorth is also republishing the original English Journey and Delight, another Priestley classic, simultaneously in April.