WINNER: Costa Biography Award

Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of the final five years of Edward ThomasÂ’s life, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and ThomasÂ’s fatal decision to fight in the First World War.

As his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914, the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century.

But the War put an ocean between them: Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight, culminating in his tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.