Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountShop Small Sale
Shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks. Don’t miss out—purchases support local bookstores.
Shop the saleLimited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayThe Running Book
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreFrom the award-winning, number one bestselling author of The Cow Book.
It is summer, the hay and silage have not yet been made on John Connell’s farm, so he has time to indulge his other great passion: running. John sets off on a marathon run of 42.2 kilometres through his native Longford, the scene of his award-winning book The Cow Book.
As he runs across woodlands, fields and tiny roads, he tells the story of his life and contemplates Ireland’s history, old and new. He also remembers other great runs he has done, from Australia to Canada, and tells the stories of some of his running heroes, such as Haile Gebrselassie.
Part memoir, part essay, The Running Book explores what it is to be alive and what movement can do for a person. It is deeply intimate and wide-ranging, local and global: Connell is as likely to write about colonialism and the effect of British imperialism in Ireland and its former colonies as he is about life on his family farm in Ballinalee, County Longford. Told in 42 chapters, each another kilometre in the 42.2k race, the whole book is 42,000 words long and it captures what it is to undertake a marathon moment by moment, in body and mind. Above all, The Running Book is a book about the nature of happiness and how for one man it came through the feet.
John Connell's work has been published in Granta’s New Irish Writing issue. His memoir The Cow Book was a #1 bestseller in Ireland and won the 2018 An Post Irish Book Award/Ireland AM Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year. He lives on his family farm, Birchview, in County Longford, Ireland.
John Connell's work has been published in Granta’s New Irish Writing issue. His memoir The Cow Book was a #1 bestseller in Ireland and won the 2018 An Post Irish Book Award/Ireland AM Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year. He lives on his family farm, Birchview, in County Longford, Ireland.