from the thrift store.
Notes from my copy:
We meet Harold, recently retired, when he receives a letter from Queenie, an old colleague, who is dying of cancer. He pens a short note, sets off to mail it, and bypassing mailboxes, decides he's going to walk the 600+ miles to her. A chance encounter with a girl in a garage convinces him that he must see her in person, believing that as long as he walks, Queenie will live. Harold meets various folks along his walk - so good, some not so much - and he reminisces on his life as he walks. In the end he says goodbye to Queenie, and starts to reconstuct his life with his wife Maureen.

If you aren't familiar with Bookcrossing, take a few minutes to check out this very cool site. Bookcrossers LOVE books, and more than anything, they love to read books and then set them free for other people to find and enjoy. I would love it if you would leave a journal entry -- you can say where you found the book or how you liked it when you read it. Then, when you are ready, pass it along for someone else to enjoy!
Thanks and happy reading!

This is one of three books on my wishlist which overjoyed me when they arrived in my mailbox yesterday!! Thank you for your generosity, NancyNova! On the TBR pile, but beckoning to me.... a good summer read!

Perhaps it is just the busy harried season, but I found myself wavering during the reading of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (by Rachel Joyce). I had been looking forward to an uplifting swift read after finally finishing the last two books which had been for book groups (both very good, but not ones I chose myself). At first, it felt like an English version of A Man Called Ove, with a main character a somewhat lonely bewildered older man, but that impression didn't last long. Harold and his wife Maureen have spent twenty years living in the same house without any real communication. Why this is so reveals itself bit by bit over the course of the story. Harold receives a short letter from a woman named Queenie Hennessey in which she tells him she is dying of cancer 600 miles away, in Berwick-on-Trent. He composes a short and most unsatisfying note back, but once he reaches the first letter box, he decides to walk the entire distance to deliver his message in person to someone who long ago "saved" him. He is unfit physically, not appropriately dressed... but off he goes. What seems early on a rather quixotic venture morphs into a pilgrimage of the mind and spirit, and it is as much Maureen's tale as Harold's. Even though I had suspected one of the revelations which came late in the book, Rachel Joyce by the end has turned this ordinary, hurting man facing his old age into a fully-fledged man you want to embrace. He meets many extraordinary people (whom you would not expect to be so... because we seldom have the time or chance to discover people beyond a fleeting encounter), and in spite of the intrusion of some less admirable types, all in all it is a love song to accepting the beauty and fragility of being alive. Or at least I felt it was. "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."

on the bench near the entrances