The Runaways: A Love Story

All they needed was a new love, an old car and a whole country to discover what was wrong with their lives. Doesn't everyone dream of escaping? Leo is pretty much sick of everything. Work, life, love... you name it. Then he meets Elsie by accident on a dreary January night in London. She's sick of everything too, but for very different reasons. A week later they decide to abandon their jobs and their friends for a trip around England in an old Volvo. They map it all around cathedrals, living among the ancient and modern, rural and urban, sacred and profane, while about them the country slowly falls apart. Leo and Elsie are pursued by her idiotic but violent stalker, propositioned by a dissolute male model, suffer bereavement, get caught in a riot and witness a horrifying fairground accident. All the while, a media panic rages over the curious behaviour of young children leaving their homes on hot summer nights. Leo and Elsie find themselves caught up in all this strangeness, while they search for some kind of love and a reason not to give up on their grand adventure. The Runaways is the first novel by journalist and author George Chesterton. It's a journey that explores how far two desperate people will go to escape, set in a world crippled by history and tangled in the absurdities of modern life. A book as comic as it is romantic, The Runaways is a very English adventure.