Long Walk Home (North) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The Long Walk Home movingly conveys the life-changing effects of love between two middle-aged people with a lot of unshared history.
Seattle Times


North's bittersweet, romantic novel has invited some early comparisons with the bestselling work of Nicholas Sparks and Robert James Waller.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer


In this lyrical first novel about love and loss by a ghostwriter for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Alec, a former speech writer for Jimmy Carter, walks like a pall bearer from Heathrow Airport to North Wales to scatter the ashes of his late wife. Along the way, he meets and begins an affair with Fiona Edwards, the spirited and married operator of a Welsh bed-and-breakfast. Fiona's marriage to her shepherd husband David is foundering on the shoals of mutual lack of interest and David's pesticide-related illness that keeps him relegated to separate quarters. There are moral dilemmas aplenty, most notably when Alec discovers David near death in the same treacherous region where he just released his wife's remains. North offers vivid descriptions of the Welsh countryside, capturing its local dialect, flora and fauna, and wild weather, but his romantic boomer tale—which includes some overwrought poetry and a few witty words on Carter's handling of the Iran hostage crisis—is sometimes too idyllic. If Nicholas Sparks set a novel in North Wales, it would read a lot like this.
Publishers Weekly


How we perceive love and acknowledge its obligations is at the core of this first novel by ghostwriter North.... If visions of Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep come to mind, which they did briefly for this reviewer, the similarity to Robert Waller's The Bridges of Madison County ends there. Fi and Alec do share an immediate connection, but their witty exchanges and the fascinating descriptions of climbing, cooking (yes, Alec can do it in the kitchen), and lambing are absorbing from the very first. Alec has experienced loss and doesn't want any more of it; Fi accepts that her dreams might have to remain just that.... A joy to read.
Library Journal


New Yorker Alec Hudson is a man with a mission. Determined to fulfill his ex-wife's dying request to have her ashes scattered on a remote Welsh mountain, the site of one of their happiest times in life, Alec decides to work through the mourning process by walking from Heathrow to North Wales. There he meets Fiona Edwards, the proprietor of a quaint farmhouse bed-and-breakfast. Prevented from scaling the mountain by inclement weather, Alec is drawn into life on the farm, helping out with lambing season and falling into an easy companionship with the outgoing Fiona, whose reclusive husband is suffering the ill effects of poisoning from a cleansing agent used on the sheep. When Alec and Fiona finally recognize and act on their mutual attraction, lifelong notions of loyalty and duty endlessly complicate their relationship. With its exploration of love at midlife, this debut novel will remind readers of the megahit Bridges of Madison County. —Wilkinson, Joanne
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