Book of the month for August on the Caught by the River site is The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North (Sceptre, £20), for which the novelist Jenn Ashworth followed Alfred Wainwright’s coast-to-coast trail from St Bees Head in the west to Robin Hood’s Bay in the east. In an interview on the site with the author Karen Lloyd, Ashworth tells how the book began as a story of her journey and about ideas of Northern-ness, but was transformed by letters she received en route from a friend with incurable cancer, and then by intimations of her own mortality.