Astray

Eluned Summers-Bremner is a writer and editor. She is the author of Insomnia: A Cultural History (Reaktion, 2007) and Ian McEwan: Sex, Death, and History.

"Moving from the Ancient Aboriginal cosmology and Eurasian steppe nomadic culture to the Romany peoples and the movements of today’s refugees, this alluring-sounding history examines ideas of belonging, alienation and hope." - Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller"Eluned Summers-Bremner’s delightfully distracted cultural history of wandering, Astray, endeavors to teach us the value and meaning of errancy in the warming worlds of late capitalist technocracy . . . Summers-Bremner’s history of wandering seeks not to romanticise anarchy or formalise chaos, but to quietly and rationally defend our abiding need for democracy, sanctuary, origin, errancy, and meaning . . . the nomadic germ that Astray excavates across a dazzling range of materials emerges instead as the essence of an older, richer, and potentially life-saving form or feeling of community - routed through ancient democracy - that we will do well to reacquaint ourselves with in the tumultuous times to come." - James Reath, ASAP Journal"With a delinquently hobo eye, Eluned Summers-Bremner tracks a winding way through the wayward lives of those of no fixed abode: exiles, fugitives, nomads, the restless, the renegade, the vagrant, and defectors of every kind from settlement. Keeping a wary distance from the longing for belonging, Summers-Bremner shows elatingly how often displacement is, more than a predicament, an alertly styled way of life, and so a vital resource for an uncertain future." - Steven Connor, Professor of English Emeritus in the University of Cambridge and author of The Madness of Knowledge