Wanderings Over the World

Gilbert Keith Chesterton needs no introduction. A master of the literary craft, he wrote over eighty books, hundreds of poems and short stories, and thousands of essays. Wanderings over the World collects three early works—The Napoleon of Notting Hill; The Man Who Was Thursday; and The Ballad of the White Horse—that capture his brilliant vision of God, man, and the cosmos, and his power to bring that vision to life with the written word.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill promises a “banquet of humour” when Auberon Quin takes the throne of England and re-establishes the provincial pomp and status of the boroughs of London. But the joke is undone when the guileless Adam Wayne declares war rather than cede Notting Hill to the armies of industrial expansion. The Man Who Was Thursday is a political thriller, detective story, and metaphysical treatise, all tied into one. Gabriel Syme’s infiltration of an anarchist organization sets off a series of bewildering events that bring hunter and hunted together in a terrifying conclusion. The Ballad of the White Horse recounts King Alfred the Great’s defeat of the Danish army at the Battle of Ethandun. A poetic tapestry of theology, allegory, and history, The Ballad endures as one of the greatest English epic poems of all time.