Description
Book Synopsis'Short but very special. ... funny, touching and quite beautiful.' Matt Cain
'A powerful finale to her classic trilogy of heartbreak and healing.' Clare Chambers
'An unforgettable story. It's beautiful all through, but the closing chapters are just astonishing, transcendent and hope-filled and life-affirming.' Donal Ryan
'Just brilliant' Patrick Gale
'Profoundly moving and deeply human, this story of self-discovery and forgiveness is essential reading. I loved every word.' Bonnie Garmus
'Astonishingly powerful... Truly stunning' Ruth Jones
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Ten years ago, Harold Fry set off on his epic journey on foot to save a friend. But the story doesn't end there.
Now his wife, Maureen, has her own pilgrimage to make.
Maureen Fry has settled into the quiet life she now shares with her husband Harold after his iconic walk across England. Now, ten years later, an unexpected message from the North disturbs her equilibrium again, and this time it is Maureen's turn to make her own journey.
But Maureen is not like Harold. She struggles to bond with strangers, and the landscape she crosses has changed radically. She has little sense of what she'll find at the end of the road. All she knows is that she must get there.
Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North is a deeply felt, lyrical and powerful novel, full of warmth and kindness, about love, loss, and how we come to terms with the past in order to understand ourselves and our lives a little better. Short, exquisite, while it stands in its own right, it is also the moving finale to a trilogy that began with the phenomenal bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and continued with The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy.
This is a slender book but it has all the power and weight of a classic.
Trade ReviewJoyce bestows tenderness and grace, revealing how forgiveness and a reckoning with the past can transform the present for the better. -- Eithne Farry * Mail on Sunday *
Joyce is a fearless explorer of emotional landscape; Maureen's pilgrimage north becomes
a moving account of healing and acceptance.
-- Patricia Nicol * Sunday Times *
Exquisite and beautifully crafted -- Ruth Jones * Daily Mail *
A beautiful novella ... with compassion and tenderness ... the novel's conclusion is deeply moving and life-affirming. -- Hannah Beckerman * Observer *
Very rarely, there is a writer who can touch the deepest and most hidden parts of the soul, by using the everyday matter of our daily lives to reveal the sacred that always surrounds us. This writer is Rachel Joyce, and her trilogy starting with
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, then
The Love Song of Queenie Hennessy and finally
Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North does just that, as well as delighting by her assured story-telling. To read her work is to think at first you are being invited to a perfect and delicious afternoon tea - then realise that you are intimate communion with what it means to be human: to suffer, to love, and to be understood. There is beauty, and the reason for art. -- Laline Paul
