One Man and His Bike: A Life-Changing Journey All the Way Around the Coast of Britain - The Word-of-Mouth Bestseller

This was both one of my favourite books read in 2011 and one of the best travelogues about the UK, ranking up there with Paul Theroux's "The Kingdom by the Sea" and Bill Bryson's "Notes from a Small Island". (Actually, on reflection, it's better than either of them.) It's hard not to envy Mike Carter's ability to be able to say one day, "Sod this", as he biked through a rainy London to his work, and decides to jack it in to follow the temptation to just keep cycling on along the Thames to the coast before turning left to circumnavigate the whole of the British coastline on his bike. Nice idea, and nice to be in the position to do it too! The bookshelves groan with the weight of a lot of these kind of travelogues, with people lighting out on their journey to find whatever it is they're looking for. Carter keeps the interest because he actually interacts with quite a few people that he meets and manages to colour these characters in quite well, and he keeps the balance between people and places quite nicely. You get the feeling that he has some quite strong opinions about the state of both Britain and Britons, which sometimes poke through the narrative, but the interesting thing for me was that the book looks on the bright side because that's what the author experienced on his trip. It would be quite easy, and no doubt enjoyable, to slag off a lot of the places Carter visits on his travels, but he resists the temptation for sarcasm and slander because, you feel, although it was part of his experience it was nowhere near all of it. We've all been to the utter run-down dumps that sit on our seashore, and we could all have a good go at laying into them for the states they are in because of the people, the politics or the poverty, but it's an easy target. Probably a dispiriting one too, and this bike ride is certainly not that. Carter was gutted when his journey ends back in London, and I was disappointed too - that the book was ending. I wanted to know what Mike did next. Did he settle down? Did he set off somewhere else? Has he still not found what he is looking for? I looked him up on the net and was surprised to see I'd read another of his books, "Uneasy Rider", about a fairly rubbish and discontented motorcycle tour through Europe. It seems, as Mike often attests in this book, there's no place like home.

I enjoyed the whole book and was disappointed when I turned the last page and saw no more script. I've done a bit of long distance cycling myself and fully understand Mike's need for food and eating whatever is available, I understand his feelings about the generosity of strangers and counting the pedal strokes up long and steep hills. I admire his ability to see the humour in situations and his obvious writing skills. I too would like to have a go at a round Britain trip but I've a wife that needs to see me with some regularity and although Mike could do the trip in five months I think it would take me a tad longer. It is the first book in a long time that I picked up in every spare moment.. I bought my copy off Amazon as a second hand book but the condition was "as new"

Reading this book is a lovely way to vicariously travel the coast of Britain. The author writes in a way which you can feel and see the vistas and the beauty of Britain. I learned alot about the various places and landmarks,the accents, the fuel/food a cyclist will come across,the hospitality of the folk of Britain and Written with humour and inspiration. As some one who cycled indoors from class room to class room during my school days (I'm talking about myself (the reviewer of this review)on a tricycle with a huge baskglet on the back and a timid bell), I'm happy to hear the Author's cobalt blue bike takes it's rightful place against the racing bike. Enjoyable read, I didn't want the journey to end.

It is quite rare that I enjoy a book so much I feel compelled to write a review, but this is one such book. As a cyclist with aspirations to go on a long tour I found Mike Carter's story inspirational. As someone who often despairs at the number of Britons who constantly berate their own nation and talk about it so negatively I found Mike's experiences a wonderful antidote. His encounters with such a wide range of interesting people - most of them friendly and helpful and only a handful of them not so reflect my own experiences. And as Mike observes, we really do live in one of the most beautiful countries on Earth. I read a few negative reviews based on the fact the the majority of the book covers the first half of the journey, and Wales, the West Country and South Coast don't get the same level of coverage as the East Coast, Scotland and the North-West, but this is well explained in the book by the author himself, and it is quite clear that his best experiences were in the first half of the journey and by the time he got to Wales clearly was getting tired or the trip (not a good time to be in that frame of mind given the fact that the worst hills of the journey are going to be in Wales and the South-West. Perhaps Mike should try the journey again but going the other way around! Although as someone who has also cycled some of those hills in Devon and Cornwall ..... he could definitely be forgiven for never wanting to do them again. Overall though this book is well deserving of 5 stars. An uplifting book and a wonderful tale of travels through Britain.

I've given this book a 5-star rating for keeping me so very entertained! This book is nothing like the type of book I would normally choose to read, but it was given to me by my boyfriend (another Mike) who loves cycling. I have thoroughly enjoyed Mr Carter's dialogue, style of writing (learned so many new words), his terrific adventure and his amazing sense of humour. Thoroughly, utterly enjoyable from beginning to end. I had to Google so many of the places he visited and that also demonstrated to me that we do indeed live on a beautiful island. Thank you so much for giving me such a beautiful insight into your adventure!

This is my 3rd cycling travelogue book (the first was excellent written by a female cyclist and the 2nd was dreadful so a lot was riding on this book). The idea of cycling around the coast of the UK is amazing but not something I could do as I'm not a serious cyclist and you have to be in order to do this trip, as the hills would kill me. After finishing this book, you could tell that cyclists are a breed apart and I mean this in the best possible way. They have a connection to their bikes which I simply don't understand as a non cyclist. If I did this trip it would be by car and I would stay in B&Bs, as I'm not a camper. But full respect to Mike Carter for completing the journey, as it showed you that the people of the UK are friendly and helpful to fellow travellers. Sometimes you can forget this if you haven’t experienced it. I love the fact that Mike added interesting details for each place he went through. I loved all the stories he heard especially about Stevie who pedalled to Hawaii, yes Hawaii! This is a trip he will never forget and will hopefully inspire others to do too!

This is such an inspiring and thought provoking book. I love Mike's sense of humour. Four stars because I was really looking forward to what he encountered in, and thought of, Wales and the West Country but was sadly disappointed as these and the rest of the return journey were crammed into the last 25 per cent of the book. He seemed to lose interest in his trip after Blackpool and dismissed most of Wales in a couple of sentences. It would have been really nice to have an epilogue too - I was dying to know what happened after the trip. Did he get to Argentina or just pick up with his old life where he had left off? It seemed that he was a troubled man rushing so much to finish the trip that he missed out in many ways. I wish he had taken some time off - a day here and there for a rest along the way, instead of rushing, and had included more of his experiences in a longer book.

I can't really remember how I found this book, but I'm extremely glad I did. I love human interest stories such as this, so read a lot of them. This is, without doubt, one of the very best I've read. The conversational, humble and witty style of writing makes it an easy and joyful read. I felt like I was part of the journey with Mike. It's far more about the characters that he encounters on his journey, than the physical act of pedalling of a push-rod, and that's what makes it so interesting. I'd recommend this book to anyone. And I'm now off to download Mike's other books!

ottimo libro, ben scritto belle avventure e viaggi. io ho letto tutti i libri di quest' autore.

Absolutely great, couldn't put it down. I wanted to stretch it out and make it last but ended up reading it over 1 weekend. Would highly recommend this book.

At times laugh out loud funny like Bill Bryson, at times wistful and penetrating like some of Paul Theroux, this book deserves to become a minor classic. At a superficial level, it fits into the road-trip-brought-on-by-a-midlife-crisis genre, but manages to get beyond the flaws typical of that genre to a more interesting place. Much like Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific , the writer begins a trip following the collapse of his marriage in midlife. Unlike Theroux's book, there's no bitterness, but more a sense of dislocation and existential confusion made bearable by looking at the world with good hearted wonderment and self-deprecating humor. He's a lost soul, sure enough, looking for something he doesn't quite find in the pages of the book, bonding long term only with his tent and his bike, but his personal story takes a back seat to the people and scenery he passes by as he circles his native land. A range of characters enlivens the tale, from the unhappiest man in England sitting at the northern end of the Lands End-John O' Groats trail, to passing a fully alive septuagenarian cycling round England in the opposite direction (at a much faster pace than the author), to a motley assembled family gathered at a farm turned flea market in Scotland, to a ferry man who pedaled (bikes and pedal boats) from England to Hawaii (concluding that crossing an ocean in a 23 foot boat or going back and forth a few hundred yards in a ferry is all the same if you just learn to live in the moment). You get a sense for the spectacular beauty of some of the more isolated spaces in Britain, as well as a feel for the hollowed out industrial centers and half abandoned working class seaside resorts left behind in the shift to a finance driven services economy. It's a book I think I will pick up again and reread in whole or part sometime. It's a picaresque tale of the road, but not so much a technical cycling book or a travel guide. The next time I travel around England I'll look through it before going, but it's not trying to do what Rick Steves or Lonely Planet do. In the same way, while to a touring cyclist many aspects of the long distance cycling felt true, it's not really a bike book, any more than Theroux's The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain or Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island are mainly about the British railways. It's about Britain, and about a funny man trying to find his way, with the bike something more than incidental but not the point of the story.

This book seems - at first look - to fit into the category “man is unsatisfied with life, takes on challenging journey to discover the meaning of it all”. And yes, there is a bit of that, but thanks to the fact that the unsatisfied man is Mike Carter, respected columnist of The Guardian, this is quite a bit more. I will get back to that. One tends to compare a bit when reading travel books, and in this case, Andrew P. Sykes comes to mind, especially his “Crossing Europe on a bike called Reggie”. In there, it is demonstrated well that sharing the clumsiness of a debuting bicycle traveller, making all the mistakes of packing too much and so on, strengthens the relationship with the reader, and shows more of the human behind. Mike Carter also shares how he packs way too much. (He took a blazer for the evenings!) And he describes it cleverly. All in all, this books starts a little too cleverly. With superior writing skill, Mike Carter tells the story of how his journey begins. But as a columnist, he is used to write with a certain distance, the observer, rather than the “Gonzo”, as he is in the book. This somehow fails to engage. This reader hung on, though, and softened up as Mike Carter reached Skegness. In an encounter with a fortune teller, the clever columnist steps back, and the person known as Mike Carter bleeds through the pages. And from here, the only way is up. In Whitley Bay, just north of Tynemouth, Mike Carter encounters Bill Scott, and stays in the B&B he runs. The conversation between the two men is so amazingly described, it is as Bill Scott rises through the page, and stands before you. Portrayal of people is certainly a great skill of Mike Carter. Well, it has to be said, mostly men. Almost only men. The two women I can remember from this book, would be the fortune teller. And a lovely girl cycling by Mike Carter’s side for a couple of miles, before inviting him to stay over at her place. Mike rejects. Regardless of that, the way Mike Carter bicycles around Britain, talking to people, and portraying them in this wonderfully vivid way, makes this book a unique piece of litterature. The portrait of a country, simply. And in between everything one wants to read in a travel book, how life on the bicycle swings between divine and horrific, how sometimes he just wants to go home, and how the journey changes a man. This reader hopes Mike Carter will continue to share people’s stories in this way. This is a good read, and still, years after it was written, stands as a must read for anyone wanting to understand Britain. And it becomes clear why more than one bicyclist and traveller has named Mike Carter as an important source of inspiration.

I'm not done with this book yet, but I'm fascinated with it. I actually bought a copy in England, but gave it to my friend for his birthday. So, I had to purchase a new copy. The book was not on Amazon Prime and it took FOREVER to get. Okay, I'm used to 2 days; this book took over seven days. And I believe it was only coming from Chicago. I'm thankful that I have an English boyfriend, because some of the things said are confusing or mean something completely (and dirty) to Americans. I only wish the map had more locations on it instead of just the base maps. I found out so many places I want to visit next time I'm in the UK. The book also inspired me to do a similar coastal trip on my bike. I have a few people excited to participate.