Chiswick author's love letter to 'England's Better Half'

Abysmal weather, slag heaps, funny accents, the bleak uplands of a landscape carved out of millstone grit and townscape of abandoned mills and shipyards, the detritus of an industrial revolution past its sell by date it would be easy to comprehend why Martin Wainwright swapped all of this for Chiswick more than two decades ago.

However, in his new book True North, the Guardian journalist (pictured right ) swiftly dispatches such myths with an incisive and wittily observant assessment of a socially and culturally flourishing region in an unrivalled setting of wild coastline, lakes and green dales inhabited by indomitably inventive northerners, proud of their past and forging a future of brilliant new enterprises.

One reviewer called True North a 'love letter' to 'England's Better Half' with its author 'preoccupied by Londoners' reactions to the north's eccentricities'.

Northerners will revel in all the local colour, while southerners will continue to wonder what all the fuss is about.

Other books by Martin Wainwright include:

• A Gleaming Landscape: A Hundred Years of the Guardian's Country Diary
• Wainwright: The Man Who Loved the Lakes
• A Good Year for Blossom: A Century of the "Guardian's" Women Country
• The "Guardian" Book of April Fool's Day
• The Guardian Book of Wartime Country Diaries
• The Coast to Coast Walk (Recreational Path Guide) (Recreational Path
• Morris Minor: The Biography - Sixty Years of Britain's Favourite Car
• The Bath Blitz and an account of the IRA bomb exploded in Bath in 1974
• Coast to Coast Walk 2009 (Recreational Path Guides)

October 29, 2009