Matt Seatons critically acclaimed memoir about his obsession for cycling & how that obsession was tamed. For a time there were four bikes in Matt Seatons life. His evenings were spent doing the miles on the roads out of south London & into the hills of the North Downs & Kent Weald. Weekends were taken up with track meets time trials & road races
- rides that took him from cold village halls at dawn & onto the empty bypasses of southern Engl&. With its rituals its code of honour & its comradeship cycling became a passion that bordered on possession. It was at once a world apart private to its initiates & through the races he rode in Belgium Mallorca & Ireland a passport to an international fraternity. But then marriage children & his wifes illness forced a reckoning with real life & ultimately a reappraisal of why cycling had become so compelling in the first place. Today those bikes are scattered sold or gathering dust in an attic. Wry frank & elegiac The Escape Artist is a celebration of an amateur sport & the simple beauty of cycling. It is also a story about the passage from youth to adulthood about what it means to give up something fiercely loved in return for a kind of wisdom.