(Source)

Harold Fry is an old man.  He’s retired, without any hobbies, trapped in a marriage with a wife who seems to despise him.  Harold and Maureen haven’t spoken in years, except to exchange small talk and the occasional barb.  Then one day, out of the blue, a letter comes for Harold from an old colleague, Queenie Hennessey, who tells Harold that she is dying of cancer in a hospice some 600 miles away.  Harold dashes off a quick note in response and walks to the post box to send the letter.  When he gets to the box, he can’t seem to drop the letter in.  He walks to the next box, and the next, until an encounter with a young woman in a garage convinces him that he should walk all the way to the hospice to see Queenie in person.  Harold believes that all that Queenie needs to survive is someone to believe in her, and that if he keeps walking, Queenie will live.  And that’s how Harold’s journey begins – in a light jacket and a pair of yachting shoes, with an idea.

As Harold walks, he reflects back on his past – his love of and marriage to Maureen, his difficulty expressing the depth of his love for their son David, and Queenie, who once did him an incredible favor.  He doesn’t really believe that he can walk 600 miles, and he struggles on, knowing that no one else really believes it either, until he meets a young immigrant woman who helps him.  Over the course of the walk, he begins to face his own fears and to learn not to cut himself down:

Harold believed his journey was truly beginning. He had thought it started the moment he decided to walk to Berwick, but he saw now that he had been naive. Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. He had faced his shortcomings and overcome them, and so the real business of walking was happening only now.

As Harold continues on his way, he encounters a cast of characters, each of whom shares his or her story, and some of whom start to walk with Harold.  Harold feels protective toward these people, wondering if they are able to share their broken selves with him because he is in and out of their lives.

He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique, and that this was the dilemma of being human.
He walked so surely it was as if all his life he had been waiting to get up from his chair.

Harold slowly covers the English countryside and stops in familiar places – such as Bath, where he watches a homeless man dance outside the Abbey Church.  Meanwhile Maureen, left at home, at first schemes to bring Harold back without the neighbors finding out he ever went missing, but as his journey becomes national news she reflects on their broken marriage and the weight of the blame she has placed upon Harold.  And she begins to realize that there are depths in Harold that she has not yet reached, and that there was more to the story of their dysfunctional marriage than she had thought.

Amal recommended this book to me as a fellow Anglophile and Cotswold-appreciator, and I loved it.  I started reading for the descriptions of the English countryside and for the places that Harold visits which are familiar to me (Devon, where he starts his journey, Bath, the Cotswolds).  But I really loved this for the characters – the human, broken characters, each of whom Harold touches in some way on his journey.  The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry really speaks for the truth that there is something broken in everyone, and something fixable if we try – and that sometimes, the unexpected thing is the thing that will lead to the greatest happiness.

Buy The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce here (not an affiliate link).