What happens when you start paying attention to your own life?

 

The Long Way Round gathers 116 essays written during a year of walking, wandering, writing, leaving, arriving, grieving, laughing, making books, making a home, and learning to notice what was there all along.

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From the footpaths of the Cotswolds to the streets of Lille, from family photographs and old love to dogs, music, books, friendship, solitude, five-euro rings, and the occasional pigeon, these essays move between the extraordinary and the wonderfully ordinary. Some are funny. Some are tender. Some were written from inside moments that had not yet resolved themselves. Together, they form not a memoir exactly, but a portrait of a life assembled from the things its author noticed.

 

The Long Way Round is about becoming and belonging, about the people we carry and the things love cannot carry for us. It is about bodies that have opinions, stories that escape their makers, doors that open and gates that don't, and the peculiar work of making a life feel like your own.

 

Above all, it is an invitation to look again. Because sometimes the long way round is where you notice everything.

 

Available in paperback on Amazon.