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.
Bookshop | Amazon | Waterstones | Blackwell’s
Praise for Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North
‘Rachel Joyce has a genius for creating the most damaged and difficult character and making us care deeply about their redemption. Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North is a powerful finale to her classic trilogy of heartbreak and healing.’ Clare Chambers
‘At last it’s Maureen’s turn! It may only have the physical heft of a novella but Rachel Joyce’s angry-sad latest packs the weight of a long marriage into the space of several well-ironed handkerchiefs. Just brilliant.’ Patrick Gale
‘Maureen Fry is wonderfully complex, flinty and closed and obsessive yet full of love and concern for others as she navigates her present and her past, carrying her terrible burdens of grief and guilt.
Rachel Joyce is deeply attuned to the complex rhythms of life and love and she sublimates this understanding, sentence by delicate, powerful, glistening sentence into an unforgettable story. It’s beautiful all through, but the closing chapters are just astonishing, transcendent and hope-filled and life-affirming. I’ll never forget this wonderful novel or the sunny, slightly teary day I spent reading it.’ Donal Ryan
‘Joyce’s characters are so charmingly eccentric that they could have leapt straight from the pages of This book is short but very special. As fans of Rachel Joyce might expect, it’s funny, touching and quite beautiful. It’s also packed with wisdom about love and loss – and is sure to provide comfort to anyone who’s known grief.’ Matt Cain
‘Maureen is so beautifully and unflinchingly portrayed – a complex contradiction of brittle and prickly with an underbelly of fragility and fear. Her journey – both physical and psychological – is compelling and profoundly moving and leaves the reader feeling fully satisfied and just a little lighter.’ Ruth Hogan