What Goes Around

This memoir of a cycle courier and her love affair with the capital delivers the goods in style...Chappell is a gifted storyteller. She deftly weaves in a plotted history of couriering, from the explosion of the industry in the late 1980s...through to its gentle decline at the hand of email attachments, file sharing and electronic signatures...In and out of all this, fine words flow on the simple but profound pleasure of floating through the city on a bicycle - of the "strange sense of stillness", and "the energy of sheer motion itself.

Fascinating for offering a ­female courier's memoir of a predominantly male culture.

With remarkably intricate and evocative detail, Chappell takes us through her journey from wide-eyed new girl to hardened veteran. She combines fascinating insight into the job with raw personal experience and passion. It feels a privilege to be allowed in. The book's heartfelt odes to cycling mean you don't have to be at all interested in actual courier work to find this absorbing. In fact, it's so well written that you probably don't even need to like bicycles to be entertained and engaged.

[A] collection of anecdotes and memories that is part personal history, part portrait of the city. Chappell is a marvellous writer, and the book reads rather like a bike ride with its succession of turns and unexpected discoveries ... The joy of cycling is at its heart, however; if any book could make you consider chucking in your desk job and throwing on some Lycra, this could be it.