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Highway Three
Highway Three
Nov 9, 2025 7:58 AM

Author:E. S. Batchelor

Highway Three

2019 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE

‘Where are you going?

The voice came again, and two figures appeared … It was clear that these men were not working for the government. They wore green uniforms, with the small red logo of the Ta’ang National Liberation Army. As they walked, their rifles flopped from side to side.’

In Myanmar, E. S. Batchelor travels the highland road leading out of Burma to China. Encounters with other travellers unveil political tensions and military history, posing questions about the borderlands between past and present, peace and conflict, person and state.

Reviews

A wholly individual writer of considerable stature

—— Sunday Telegraph

Her touch is deft, her perceptions keen, her ear for speech phenomenal. Her people are triumphantly alive

—— New York Times

Miss Tyler is a writer whose special gift is to convey the richness, strangeness and unpredictability of seemingly everyday lives...She is a wholly individual writer and one of considerable stature

—— Sunday Telegraph

It’s not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book... If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century, which writer would he be? He’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big

—— Margaret Atwood , New York Review of Books

An extraordinary and brilliant novel of ideas

—— Time Out

Tense and heartbreaking

—— Los Angeles Times

An ingenious, ambitious, at times dizzily cerebral work... It soars and spins... The novel attains an aching, melancholy beauty

—— New York Times

A splendid intellectual adventure [and] a heartbreaking love story

—— Washington Post

Nothing less than brilliant

—— John Updike

A perfect novel

—— Financial Times

In Olive Kitteridge, Strout has created one of those rare characters...so vivid and humorous they seems to take on a life independent of the story framing them

—— Guardian

Elizabeth Strout is... one of the undisputed heavyweights of generous, clear-eyed domestic realism

—— Daily Mail

A special, precious book...full of hope and humanity

—— Red

Funny, sad, tender and truthful, this is pure joy

—— Stylist

A terrific writer

—— Zadie Smith

If you want to see what the policies from Whitehall that keep the working classes struggling look like in human guise, when placed in an environment where their identities have to be negotiated daily, That Reminds Me is the viewfinder you need. It’s post-Thatcher reality in the inner city, clouded over by racism, infused with West African stoicism, narrated by a voice that has known something different. It’s life as a growing boy experiences it, with a powerless wonder; it’s messy and beautiful, fractured but eloquent. K’s story reminds us that our scars should not strip us of our dignity.

—— Nii Parkes

In weaving emotion into literary gold, truth has never been this painfully told, or this beautiful.

—— Courttia Newland

The best poetry out since Warsan Shire.

—— Symeon Brown

A fast-paces, dense, poetic, original and bewitching story by an important new writer. That Reminds Me will long be remembered by readers.

—— Alain Mabanckou

Deserves the same recognition that greeted Max Porter's similarly constructed fictionalised memoir Grief is the Thing With Feathers... uses its broken-up style to explore experiences that defy easy comprehension. There is nothing indulgent about this quietly observed account of a black man Owusu gives the name of K... There is a physicality to his writing, the impression of incoherent feelings being wrestled into shape, that lends his book heft. K's future is, in the end, ambiguous, but Owusu's surely gleams bright.

—— Claire Allfree , Metro

A bold prose poem written in novella form, That Reminds Me is one of the most powerful pieces of writing to be published in 2019.

—— Foyles

The latest release from Stormzy's increasingly impressive #Merky imprint, this is a stylistically ambitious memoir of a precarious Tottenham upbringing. Owusu writes with a poet's gift for seemingly incidental observation in a potent story that's left deliberately, troublingly fragmented.

—— Metro

A virtuosic debut by a raw new talent. An honest and timely evaluation of a black man's struggle to belong and later come to terms with failing mental health. Utterly convincing and deeply sad, Owusu's storytelling will bring readers to tears.

—— Scarlett Sangster , The Irish News

Derek Owusu is not just a brilliant writer, he’s a deep thinker. Anything he does is relevant, and meaningful. It would be easy to say that he is mainly concerned with the condition of young black men, but in truth he speaks truth to all of us.

—— Benjamin Zephaniah

A magnificent achievement.

—— Paul Gilroy

Written with candour and verve, and full of moments of heart-stopping anguish and beauty.

—— Stephen Kelman
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