Summary: At the age of forty-five, Miles Morland resigned from his highly paid job (spent largely "shouting down a phone") as head of the London office of a leading Wall Street firm, and took a walk across France with his wife, Guislaine. Neither of them was accustomed to strolling more than the distance between a restaurant and a waiting taxi, but in France they walked 350 miles through the foothills of the Pyrenees, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
The planning of the route, Miles's mania for maps and guidebooks, Guislaine's practice walks around the Serpentine and the purchasing of what they thought was the right equipment set the tone for what develops into a highly entertaining account of the pleasures and agonies of walking the best part of twenty miles a day in the heat of a southern summer.
Along the way Miles frequently looks back with relief, and often with hilarity, on the life from which he has escaped. Their leisurely progress past farmyards and along riverbanks, when their only deadline is to reach the next village in time for a long lunch in the shade of a plane tree, is in telling contrast to the extraordinary pressures of life in the City in the 1980s, pressures that had led Miles and Guislaine to get divorced - and then to remarry each other.
Miles Away is the story of a walk, a relationship and an abrupt change of lifestyle: accepting a lower standard of living in return for an improvement in the quality of life. Many people dream of doing what Miles Morland did. This book shows not only that it is possible, but that the rewards can be immeasurable. - (Blackwell North Amer)
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