**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2023**
''Full of delightful anecdotes and interviews and fascinating historical tales'' Mail on Sunday
A panoramic portrait of the wonderous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.
A toy, a tool, a liberator, or complete nuisance: the bicycle has been many things to many people over the decades, yet it endures as the most popular form of transport in the world. How has such a simple machine achieved so much?
Combining history, travelogue and memoir, Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous vehicle from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a ''green machine''. Readers meet unforgettable characters: women''s suffragists who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity.
By examining the bicycle''s past and peering into its fu
