Read more
A memoir in which Sayarer recounts 3 years he spent as a cycle courier in London after his return from a world record breaking around the world trip. A chronicle of the modern city at the start of the 21st century.
About the author
JULIAN SAYARER cycled a half dozen times across Europe to his second nation of Türkiye before before breaking a world record for a circumnavigation by bicycle, and going on to write Life Cycles (2014). He is the winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Writing Award for Interstate (2016), an account of hitchhiking through middle America, and is the author of Messengers (2016), All at Sea (2017), Fifty Miles Wide (2020), Ondaatje Prize-longlisted Iberia (2021), and Türkiye (2023). Julian combines a background in political science to create a critically acclaimed travel writing style - politics at roadsides. In this 12mph view of the world in passing, he uses human stories and journeys to document global issues for a broad audience. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Financial Times, Aeon Magazine, and in numerous cycling publications.
Summary
AUTHOR OF INTERSTATE, STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016
"Julian's tales of weaving through the streets of London on two wheels bring to life the gig economy, showing how things have changed in the modern workforce but have also stayed the same. Messengers gives the reader insights on what goes on behind the grand lobbies of the UK's banks and large companies, to see the people who really make business work" Financial Times
Messengers sees Julian Sayarer return to work as a London bicycle courier, after six months cycling around the world. From saddle and kerbside, his stories of delivering flowers to politicians, and administration notices to banks toppled by the financial crisis, make for a social history of a less seen city, written from the perspective of someone stuck in one of London's most insecure and poorly paid jobs.
Underneath the deliveries, we meet London's bicycle messengers, a family drawn from jaded graduates, jailbirds and recovering drug addicts. The riders all share their brushes with the law, struggles on the breadline and compete together in alleycat races, forming an unlikely but tender community upon the streets.
With a bicycle the one constant that seems to make sense of everything else, Messengers is a two-wheeled portrait of everyday life in a modern city at the start of the twenty-first century.
"Sayarer is a precise and passionate writer . . . The vast energy of his commitment to discover, observe and communicate makes for engrossing, often incandescent prose. We need writers who will go all the way for a story, and tell it with fire. Sayarer is a marvellous example" HORATIO CLARE
Foreword
World-record-holding cyclist and author's second book, part memoir and part travelogue, that recounts three years spent as a cycle courier in London after the author's return from an around the world trip. Not only about cycling, this is a book about London life from swanky offices to plutocrats' mistresses.
