On The Roof

A study of an ancient craft, landscape and community from an outstanding new voice

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A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

'An excellent, beautifully written book' Patrick Galbraith, Sunday Times

'A rich and hugely enjoyable celebration of the local, the vernacular and traditional ... a beautifully written craftsman's memoir' Daily Mail

'What a marvellous book. Full of lore, information, interest, beautifully captured people. Poetry' Craig Raine

Thatched roofs are like living organisms: each one a web of repair, replacement and alteration, shaped, dressed and re-moulded by every pair of hands that works on it.

Thatching is one of the world's oldest crafts - an ancient trade that roots us in nature, as Tom Allan discovered when he quit an office job to become an apprentice in Devon. Now a master of the trade, in On the Roof he goes in search of its history and future, meeting fellow thatchers, from the son of a lobster fisherman who thatches with a dune grass in the Hebrides, to a Syrian refugee who found peace among the seagrass roofs of Denmark, to one of the first women to master Japan's 5,000-year-old thatching tradition.

Eye-opening, beautifully told and revealing a tradition hand-shaped over centuries, On the Roof is a story of how we live with the land and how we have chosen to treat it.