The Long Walk Home

When forty-four year-old Fiona Edwards answers the door of her farmhouse bed and breakfast, she discovers a tall, middle-aged man shouldering a hulking backpack. He is unshaven, sweat-soaked ... and arrestingly handsome. What neither of them knows at this moment is that their lives are about to change forever. American Alec Hudson has carried the ashes of his late ex-wife, Gwynne, all the way from his arrival at London's Heathrow Airport to this valley amid the mountains of North Wales. He is honoring her request that he scatter her remains atop Cadair Idris, a towering mountain they had climbed years before, the mountain behind Fiona's farm. But the weather is vicious and, as he waits for it to moderate, Alec and Fiona realize they are drawn together by mutual loss and longing. Fiona is married, and her husband, a sheep farmer who has been poisoned by an agricultural chemical and lives like a recluse in a distant part of the farm, has become frighteningly unstable. When Alec finally summits and scatters Gwynne's ashes, he is caught in a blinding hailstorm. As he searches for the route down, he comes upon the body of a man he recognizes from a photo at the farm: Fiona's husband, David, who is close to death. Will North's debut novel is a story about good people struggling with the agonizing complexities of fidelity: to a spouse, a memory, a moral code, and finally to a passion neither thought would ever reappear in their lives. By turns lyrical and gripping, set amid a landscape of breathtaking beauty and unpredictable danger, this is a story you will not soon forget.