Where to Start with Ewan McGregor: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Ewan McGregor — how to approach Long Way Round, the adventure travel memoir he wrote with Charley Boorman about their 31,000-mile motorcycle journey eastward from London to New York through Europe, Central Asia, and the Americas. A complete reading guide.
By Natalie Osei
Ewan McGregor (born 1971) is a Scottish actor and film star whose credits include the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Trainspotting, Moulin Rouge!, and Black Hawk Down. Long Way Round (2004), co-written with his friend and fellow actor Charley Boorman, was the companion book to their Channel 4 documentary series of the same name, documenting a 31,000-mile motorcycle journey eastward from London to New York in 2004. The series attracted millions of viewers in Britain and established McGregor as a credible adventure traveller as well as a film actor. Long Way Down (2007) followed their next journey, from Scotland to Cape Town.
Where to Start: Long Way Round (2004)
The essential Ewan McGregor — and the best adventure travel book of the 2000s. Long Way Round opens in April 2004 with McGregor and Charley Boorman leaving their families in London on BMW R1150 Adventure motorcycles, heading east. The route had been planned for three years and required two years of negotiating visas, studying maps, and learning to ride competently across terrain neither man had previously encountered. What follows is one of the most ambitious overland journeys attempted in the modern era, documented with uncommon honesty about what it actually requires.
The Kazakhstan chapters are where the book finds its register. Kazakhstan in 2004 was a country of extraordinary contrasts — vast empty steppe, crumbling Soviet infrastructure, oil-boom construction in the cities, almost no tourist infrastructure — and McGregor and Boorman rode through it on tracks that barely qualified as roads. The physical hardship was real: the bikes fell repeatedly, the progress was painfully slow, and the country’s scale made every day feel like an exercise in managing the gap between expectation and reality. The writing in these chapters has a quality that the earlier, more comfortable European sections do not — the kind of detail and attention that comes from having nothing to do but watch and feel.
Mongolia is the journey’s centrepiece. McGregor and Boorman crossed the Mongolian steppe without roads — navigating by compass bearing across hundreds of miles of grassland where the concept of a road was simply absent. The steppe is one of the last places on Earth that genuinely resists the infrastructure of modern travel, and the book captures its particular quality: the silence, the scale, the physical beauty, the complete absence of anything familiar. The Mongolian sections are among the finest adventure travel writing in English about Central Asia.
The Road of Bones — the Kolyma Highway through Siberia, built by gulag labour and named informally for the remains of those who died building it — is the journey’s hardest section, and McGregor and Boorman tackle it with a combination of competence and barely suppressed terror that reads as entirely credible. The road surface is corrugated and potholed in a way that damages motorcycles systematically; the landscape is extraordinary; the logistics of fuel and accommodation require constant improvisation. The honesty about near-failure makes the eventual completion feel genuinely earned.
The friendship between McGregor and Boorman is the book’s emotional spine. Alternating chapters mean readers see both perspectives, and the book does not hide the moments when the two men were not getting along — when accumulated exhaustion, different riding speeds, or conflicting decisions created friction that required explicit acknowledgement and repair. Friendship that survives three and a half months of this quality of pressure is a specific achievement, and the book earns the warmth of its ending.
Reading Ewan McGregor
Long Way Round is McGregor’s essential book. Readers who want to continue should move directly to Long Way Down (2007), which covers the journey from Scotland to Cape Town with comparable scale and honesty.
For the full Ewan McGregor bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Ewan McGregor author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Ewan McGregor?
Long Way Round: Chasing Shadows Across the World (2004) is the essential book — the written account of the motorcycle journey McGregor completed with his friend Charley Boorman in 2004, riding BMW R1150 Adventure motorcycles east from London through Europe, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, Alaska, and Canada to New York. 31,000 miles across nineteen countries in three and a half months. The book, written in alternating chapters by McGregor and Boorman, is more honest about difficulty, fear, and relationship strain than the television documentary that accompanied the trip — and the Kazakhstan and Mongolia sections are among the best adventure travel writing of the decade.
What is Long Way Round about?
Long Way Round is about what happens when you point two people at the most challenging overland route on Earth and ask them to cover it on motorcycles. The physical challenges — the Road of Bones through Siberia, the roadless Mongolian steppe, the Soviet-era tracks of Kazakhstan — are documented in specific, unglamorous detail. But the book is equally about the friendship under sustained pressure: the moments when exhaustion and proximity produced near-arguments, when the accumulated weight of the journey required deliberate repair. McGregor and Boorman were friends before they left London and remain friends in the book's aftermath, but the honesty about the difficulty of that sustained camaraderie makes the friendship credible in a way that travel writing often is not.
Do I need to watch the TV series to appreciate the book?
No — the book works as a standalone, though readers who have seen the Channel 4 documentary series first will find it enriching in both directions. The television version emphasises the adventure and the spectacle; the book has more room for the slower, harder, more mundane dimensions of the journey — the bureaucratic delays, the equipment failures, the long days covering minimal ground. McGregor's celebrity generates context in the book (diplomatic doors opened, complications with Russian attention) that the television series handled differently. Reading the book first, then watching the series, works well; so does the reverse.
What should I read after Long Way Round?
After Long Way Round, the sequel Long Way Down (2007) covers McGregor and Boorman's journey from John O'Groats in Scotland to Cape Town, South Africa — different terrain, comparable spirit. For adventure travel writing with similar ambition, Ted Simon's Jupiter's Travels is the definitive motorcycle circumnavigation narrative, covering four years and 45,000 miles in the 1970s. Rolf Potts's Vagabonding provides the philosophical framework for long-term travel that Long Way Round embodies. For solo overland adventure, Ernesto Che Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries covers a younger journey with a very different political trajectory.
