When unhappily married Fiona Edwards answers the door of her farmhouse bed and breakfast, she discovers a tall man shouldering a hulking backpack. He is unshaven, sweat-soaked...but arrestingly handsome.
American Alec Hudson has carried the ashes of his ex-wife from London's Heathrow Airport to the mountains of North Wales. Honoring her request to scatter them atop the towering mountain directly behind Fiona’s farm, he attempts to fulfill her wish, but the weather stops him.
As Alec waits for safer conditions, he and Fiona are drawn together by loss and by a passion neither thought would ever reappear in their lives. When Alec stumbles upon something he never expected to see, he is faced with a series of choices he hoped never to make.
An evocative story of honorable people struggling with the complexities of fidelity, and of the hope for a second chance at love.
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.
"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."
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
"A brilliantly realized romance..."
