the unlikely pilgrimage of harold fry review guardian

'Until I started writing, nobody really asked how I thought about things,' she observes quietly, cupping her pretty Emma Bridgewater china cup between her palms, like a delicate bird.

'There was one time when the garden was filled with journalists from Spain, and I thought: 'What has happened?' Now, she can't even hide in the countryside. It went on to win several awards and was long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker. Joyce struggled with her confidence while writing it over the course of a year, almost giving up several times. She learned about pacing and plot by writing for radio but didn't attempt a novel until she began Harold Fry, a charming story about a recently retired pensioner who unexpectedly sets off on a journey to save a terminally ill friend as a way to deal with her grief over losing her father. The notion of the world shifting from familiar moorings could also be a description of Joyce's own life in the past few years, how the mystery of her creative process has manifested in global attention she could never have imagined.įor 20 years, she was an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company, until she gave it up to write dramas for BBC Radio 4 because she couldn't bear being away for extended periods from her four children, now aged 11 to 18. When Byron's best friend tells him that two seconds were added to time in 1972 to balance clocks with the movement of the Earth – a true event – he is unsettled by the change in a measurement that is supposed to be immutable. 'I am very close to myself as a child,' says Joyce, 51. Like her, the 10-year-old protagonist of her new book, Byron Hemming, is a worrier. 'The world blew open,' she tells me in a wide-eyed manner about her feelings in the wake of the moon landings of the early seventies. Dressed in a plain knit dress and leggings, she is all almond-shaped green eyes and wild, fuzzy halo of hair. Now, curled up in a chair in her cozy, cluttered kitchen, she looks as though she could have emerged from the magical, quilted landscape, delicate as a forest sprite. 'I'll talk you in,' she told me on the phone, giving directions down a road only goats could easily navigate. Her first book, the beloved, bestselling The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, has made Joyce an international star, and the journey to find her, deep in the English countryside in a 17th-century farmhouse, has been quite a journey, too – three hours northwest of London, up and down winding, narrow roads in Gloucestershire.

The unlikely pilgrimage of harold fry review guardian