Published by Overlapse in 2015, The Longest Way Round is Chris Dorley-Brown’s sustained reconstruction of a family history that official memory cannot fully contain. At its centre are Peter and Brenda, two Londoners born in 1920 whose lives were shaped by wartime separation, romance, imprisonment and postwar settlement. Peter served as a heavy artillery sergeant, survived the Battle of Crete, spent four years in German prisoner-of-war camps, and endured a long death march near the end of the war. Yet the book does not treat these events as a finished historical record.

Instead, Dorley-Brown works from an inheritance of photographs, film negatives and letters, including images confiscated from his father during captivity. These materials were not assembled for a family album, and their fragmentary, uneven character becomes central to the book’s method. Historical images are woven together with photographs made by Dorley-Brown in Britain and on journeys through Europe that retrace aspects of his parents’ lives. The result is neither conventional memoir nor documentary reconstruction, but a layered sequence in which evidence, absence and conjecture remain visibly in dialogue.

The book’s distinctive force lies in the way public history is brought into intimate proximity with personal identity and memory. Dorley-Brown’s contemporary photographs register how inherited experience can continue to shape a way of seeing decades later, while the archive resists any single, authoritative account of the past. The story’s wartime circumstances also contain an arresting historical connection: during captivity, Peter befriended Conrad Barnack, son of Leica inventor Oskar Barnack; the two men later reconnected after the war.

For collectors, The Longest Way Round merits attention as a carefully conceived photobook about the making—and limits—of family narrative. Its significance lies not simply in the extraordinary material it uncovers, but in the formal decision to let new and historical photographs complicate one another. The 168-page English paperback, issued by Overlapse, stands as a focused example of the photobook treating archival research as an active, unresolved visual practice.