A travel writing classic, with a new preface by the author and an afterword by Geoff Dyer.

Can you be a pilgrim without leaving your life behind? How does it feel to approach everyday places with the same reverence as grand cathedrals? And how are we changed by even the smallest of journeys? James Attlee asks these questions and more in his thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of a pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew: the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door.

Attlee’s Cowley has little to do with the dreaming spires of his city. Leaving tourism and student life aside, Attlee instead presents a vital and delightfully motley collection of places, people, languages, and cultures. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, from halal shops to Brazilian art dealers to reggae clubs to quiet churchyards, Attlee celebrates the appealing and homegrown eclecticism that so often comes under attack from predatory developers.

Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Isolarion is at once a charming road movie, a battle cry raised against creeping homogenisation, and a love song to the gloriously messy real life of the city he calls home.

'The attraction, for Attlee, is that Cowley Road 'is both unique and nothing special'; the resulting book is unique and very special...Residents of East Oxford can be proud to have this eccentric advocate in eloquent expolrer in their midst.' Geoff Dyer, The Guardian

‘The attraction, for Attlee, is that the Cowley Road ’is both unique and nothing special’; the resulting book is unique and very special . . . Residents of East Oxford can be proud to have this eccentric advocate and eloquent explorer in their midst.’

‘A new Oxford that no guide book has yet captured.’

‘Attlee proves that good travel writing is not about where you go, or how you go there, but the way that you look at the world that you pass through.’

‘Isolarion, despite its title, is about engagement. Attlee shows the hidden beauty of the plural society.’

‘Attlee captures the essence of this city better than any tour bus ever could.’

‘A vivid account of daily life, fluid and unsettling, in a modern British town with powerful allegorical reflections on the connections between past and present, time and space, and high culture and the hard-scrabble world that sustains it. Oxford may be the city of lost causes, and this book is indeed ambitious; it could easily sound sententious or twee. But it works, gloriously.’

James Attlee is the author of Guernica: Painting the End of the World; Station to Station, shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017 and Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, among other titles. His digital fiction The Cartographer’s Confession won the New Media Writing Prize in 2018.