Elizabeth Gowing is not a likely yogini. She is too fond of cake and to-do lists, and sometimes falls over on her mat.

But yoga has taken her on journeys both inside and out and in Unlikely Positions (in Unlikely Places) she follows yoga around Britain – from the village hall where a quivering triangle pose is interrupted by the council recycling collection to the soaring aerial yoginis of Surrey. Her feet start to hurt and she realises that yoga is a current of shared experience that runs quietly through British society, through Middle England to the nation’s extremes. In schools and hospitals, from Newcastle to Nottingham, Wales to West Kilbride, she untangles the Ashtanga from the Kundalini, the Sanskrit from the whimsical new-age, and finds the ways that yoga is rebuilding communities and lives – and her own wobbling body.