When forty-three-year-old Fiona Edwards first sees the lanky backpacker striding up the lane toward her award-winning farmhouse bed-and-breakfast in the remote mountains of North Wales, she’s puzzled. She’s used to unexpected strangers, but few arrive on foot. The man to whom she opens her door is
middle-aged, unshaven, sweat-soaked . . . and arrestingly handsome. What neither of them knows at that moment is that their lives are about to change forever.

American Alec Hudson has carried the ashes—and the memory—of his late ex-wife, Gwynne, all the way from London’s Heathrow Airport, honoring her request that he scatter them atop a mountain they had climbed together years before—the same brooding peak whose jagged cliffs rise to the sky from the back pastures of Fiona’s farm. But the weather doesn’t cooperate, and as Fiona and Alec wait for it to clear, they are drawn together by mutual loss, longing, and the miracle of love at midlife.

On the day he finally reaches the summit, Alec is caught in a vicious hailstorm. As he struggles to descend, he stumbles upon the body of a man he recognizes from a photograph at the farm: it is Fiona’s ailing and reclusive husband, David, and he is close to death.

Will North’s debut novel, The Long Walk Home, is a story about grief and hope, about love and loss, and about two people struggling with the agonizing complexities of fidelity—to a spouse, to a moral code, to each other, and to a passion neither thought would ever appear again. By turns lyrical and gripping, set amid a landscape of breathtaking beauty and unpredictable danger, this is a story you will not soon forget.

Reviews:

"Love that comes along too late—and thus is doomed by the prior commitments of an honorable life—is dangerous territory, veering close to the precipice of bathos. Will North's debut novel The Long Walk Home stays the course; and the results are genuine, tender and affecting.”
— Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Still Summer

"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

"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

"[A] lyrical first novel about love and loss. . . North offers vivid descriptions of the Welsh countryside, capturing its local dialect, flora and fauna, and wild weather. . .if Nicholas Sparks set a novel in North Wales, it would read a lot like this!"
— Publishers Weekly