1. “Travelling: the dank oily days after Christmas. The motorway, its wastes looping London: the margin’s scrub grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon. Four o’clock: light sinking over the orbital road.” So wrote which Booker prize-winning novelist?

   1. Julian Barnes in Flaubert's Parrot

   2. Hilary Mantel in Beyond Black

   3. Ian McEwan in Enduring Love

   4. Penelope Lively in The Ghost of Thomas Kempe

2. What is the name of the 35-year-old architect who becomes trapped on a traffic island below three motorways after a car crash in JG Ballard’s Concrete Island?

   1. James Ballard

   2. Robert Kerans

   3. Paul

   4. Robert Maitland

3. Which animals die on the motorway in Colin Dann’s children’s classic The Animals of Farthing Wood?

   1. Hedgehogs

   2. Adder

   3. Baby rabbits

   4. Kestrel

4. “The dull silvertop that acts as a prophylactic between driver and landscape ...this grim necklace ... this conceptual ha-ha ... a tourniquet, sponsored by the Department of Transport and the Highways Agency, to choke the living breath from the metropolis”. Who wrote an entire book about walking around the M25?

   1. David Peace

   2. Peter Ackroyd

   3. Iain Sinclair

   4. Robert Macfarlane

5. “It may well be that these vast concrete intersections are the most important monuments of our urban civilisation, the twentieth century’s equivalent of the pyramids, but do we want to be remembered in the same way as the slave-armies who constructed what, after all, were monuments to the dead?” Said who?

   1. Thomas Pynchon

   2. JD Salinger

   3. JG Ballard

   4. James Kelman

6. Which UK motorway is built on millions of pulped Mills & Boon novels?

   1. The M11

   2. The M6 toll road

   3. The M23

   4. The M1

7. “When they’re both on the central reservation Amber steps out exactly like she did before in front of the traffic coming in the other direction and the screeching to a halt and the horns all start again.” In which Booker shortlisted novel do two characters make a mad dash across a motorway?

   1. Ali Smith’s The Accidental

   2. Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English

   3. Tom McCarthy’s C

   4. Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk

8. What is discovered beside the motorway in Stephen King’s fantasy novel Wizard and Glass?

   1. The Emerald City

   2. Neverland

   3. A crazy train

   4. Wonderland

9. How does Isis travel the motorways and roads of Britain in Iain Banks’s Whit?

   1. Hiding in car boots

   2. She shrinks herself and climbs into someone’s pocket

   3. By motorbike

   4. Sitting on a plank

10. “Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats." Which work of post-apocalyptic fiction is this from?

    1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

    2. The Stand by Stephen King

    3. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

    4. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

Solutions

1:B, 2:D, 3:A, 4:C, 5:C, 6:B, 7:A, 8:A, 9:D, 10:A

Scores

1. 2 and above.

   Sunday driver. Get your L-plates back on

2. 5 and above.

   Poor. Take the next exit

3. 8 and above.

   Excellent clutch control. Stop at the services for some well-earned refreshment

4. 10 and above.

   Speed-freak! Good work