"Moving from the ancient Aboriginal cosmology and Eurasian steppe nomadic culture to the Romany peoples and the movements of today’s refugees, this alluring-sounding history examines ideas of belonging, alienation, and hope."

Bookseller

"Summers-Bremner’s delightfully distracted cultural history of wandering, Astray, endeavors to teach us the value and meaning of errancy in the warming worlds of late capitalist technocracy. . . . Summers-Bremner’s history of wandering seeks not to romanticise anarchy or formalise chaos, but to quietly and rationally defend our abiding need for democracy, sanctuary, origin, errancy, and meaning. . . . The nomadic germ that Astray excavates across a dazzling range of materials emerges instead as the essence of an older, richer, and potentially life-saving form or feeling of community—routed through ancient democracy—that we will do well to reacquaint ourselves with in the tumultuous times to come."

ASAP/Journal

"With a delinquently hobo eye, Summers-Bremner tracks a winding way through the wayward lives of those of no fixed abode: exiles, fugitives, nomads, the restless, the renegade, the vagrant, and defectors of every kind from settlement. Keeping a wary distance from the longing for belonging, Summers-Bremner shows elatingly how often displacement is, more than a predicament, an alertly styled way of life, and so a vital resource for an uncertain future."

Steven Connor, professor of English emeritus at the University of Cambridge, author of "The Madness of Knowledge"