Beautifully conflates the personal with the global
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In Tomkins’s award-winning and complex novel, the personal and the intimate are inextricably entwined with the global and environmental. On a mild New Year’s Eve, Rosalie is on a cliff walk when the weather turns and she has to seek immediate shelter. Holed up in a tiny cave, the weather becomes steadily worse, and as the cold and her own tiredness overcome her, Rosalie recalls the years that have brought her to this moment, the devastating grief that has driven her to this very spot and this very walk, and the only bright spots in her recent years.

Beautifully conflating personal grief with grief for the planet, Tomkins makes the global into a very personal matter, making Rosalie an extremist voice for environmental responsibility. The family scenes are written with minute attention to detail and the reality of family life; while the depiction of Rosalie’s journey from middle class suburban housewife to eco-warrior are given verisimilitude by Tomkins’s descriptions of the natural world. I only have one question: what happened to the cormorant?

For a very long time, grief was an abstract concept for me. Only when I experienced it first hand after the passing of my father, seeing myself and those of my family, I realized how it impacts each of us differently and how we all react to it.

But when a parent sees their fully grown adult child pass, the grief is unimaginable. A life taken before its fully realized, to see ones own child's life is cut short, moving forward is not always easy or simple. The last time Rosalie saw her son or had any contact with him was during Christmas when her husband and her son argued over climate change and her son's insistence on choosing climate science as a career. Over next few months they don't talk or write or visit, only to hear about his untimely demise. This changes the course of family dynamics - twin teenage sons, a daughter and her husband who has certain condescension towards ideas that clash against his own.

In an effort to understand her son, Rosalie looks into his life, meets his best friends and tries to understand the crisis the planet is under. She experiences loneliness in her grief- with her children moving forward in their lives and her husband internalizing the loss and moving on. The journey she takes to understand her son transforms her and her future, to lead a life her son would have been proud of.

A marvelous work about grief, loss and the ideologies we choose to believe, the impact our lives and choices have on those who love us.

<i>Thank you to Netgalley and Aurora Metro Books for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review.</i>

3.5

The Wilder Path is ostensibly a book about grief. The narrator, Rosalie (Roly), begins the story trapped in a cave after an accident has left her stranded. Her companion is an injured cormorant and, as her supplies dwindle, she contemplates what has brought her to this place.

Her story revolves around her son, Jonnie, a young man with big ideals who has lost his life protesting on a Greenpeace ship. After Jonnie's death Roly comes to realise that she barely knew her grown son and the causes he has been trying to tell her about - mass extinction, global warming etc - have been dismissed by both Roly and husband, Hugo.

The rest of the book delves into Roly's increasing involvement in living a greener life but her methods are often difficult to accept and she gradually becomes obsessed with this one topic to the exclusion of everything and everyone else in her life.

I found A Wilder Path quite a hard book to read as it is set starting at a time when global warming was considered a crank subject. I'm quite a sensitive sort and reading about the destruction of the planet affected me quite badly, so much so that I considered NFA'ing this novel - much as Roly's friends treat her predictions of doom.

There was very little light in this book and it can be quite depressing at points. I would have liked some small optimism to shine through. Nonetheless, Roly's descent into mania is well observed and her inability to process Jonnie's death is poignant.

I'd recommend this book for anyone struggling in this world.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Aurora Metro Books for the advance review copy.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I wasn’t sure what it was about particularly; walking perhaps. How surprised I was a few pages in when the narrator is caught out on a cliff top walk and takes shelter in a sea-cave. The ongoing storm and horrendous weather not only keep her there to ride it out but the conditions lead to a cliff-fall trapping her there.

It is a story of a person slowly coming to terms with their situation and facing the distinct possibility there will be no rescue party. No-one knows she was out for a walk. She has no means of escape. The angry sea on one side, the broken cliff face surrounding her, an unclimbable barrier brooding over her. With little food, limited access to fresh water the days pass with increased confusion but a growing acceptance of her own mortality.

Rather than her life flashing before her eyes she has time to reflect and detail how she got to this point in her life.

This is a personal journey of self-reflection that is so beautifully written we are quickly brought into her story. There is no self-pity or entitlement.
No space for righteous reflection or justification for her life choices. In this way although her decisions and conversion to green issues while alienating others among her family and friends, we never lose empathy for her.

The reason I liked this book so much was this oblique exposure to ideas of global warming through a life deeply changed by the death of her son and then identifying with his values. This isn’t a simple change of tack or some clever insight and understanding but a slow and painful realisation that you couldn’t just observe and remain passive in these issues. In this way; her anger and grief for the Jonnie’s loss when crusading for Greenpeace to “Save the Planet” becomes an open response which leads to her own informed activism.

I loved that she does these things for herself, responding to perceived climate issues and not to champion her son’s memory or fulfil his own life’s work. In the process the story works well as a diary of a life in crisis and one contemplating death, while also presents issues in an informative and interesting way.

Therefore do not feel intimidated by this book. It will not overwhelm you to become self-sufficient, a forager or a Just Stop Oil protestor. Rather embrace it all, fall in love with”Roly” as I did, become informed and enlightened.

A book to enjoy and reflect upon from your own safe space.

Beautifully written with an unusual premise underlying the plot, this book grips you and won’t let go. I loved the environmental observations and how these were tied to personal reflections and experience. It’s not a preachy book but it will make you think.

Roly lives a comfortable life that is upended by grief, and finds herself compelled to take action around climate change.
She recounts this journey as she finds herself stranded in a coastal cave in a storm, with limited supplies.
I found Roly's story quite compelling, although there were times I felt the story lulled a little. I also found the dialogue to be somewhat stilted at times.
An interesting book around society's attitudes to environmental issues, and the lingering effects of grief.

This follows Roly as she is trapped in a coastal cave for several days after a heavy storm during which she reminisces over her life. Her eldest son had died at sea just before completing his degree and we see how she upends her life to understand and then take on his beliefs.

I spent a lot of novel trying to decide if its primary goal was to explore climate change or grief before deciding that obsession was the driving force.

She particularly caught the essence of how a row feels between loved ones and those passages were the strongest in the novel.

This was my first time reading an environmentalist novel and it was a very intense experience. It is beautifully written, Rosalie's grief for her son entangled with his and now her grief for a world running into its climate doom. Rosalie is one of the most realistically human characters I have ever read, flawed, veering between passion, hysteria, and detachment. You find yourself sometimes in a position like the people around her she charges with apathy to our world - it can get deeply uncomfortable and a part of you gets so deeply sad and wants to put the book down. I think that is intentional - I'm glad I didn't, because the book is not only educating on our crisis but also a love letter to nature, even in its now so precarious state. It shakes you up but also makes you pause and appreciate what still is.

The only eason I give four stars are the characters of 'The Twins', Rosalie's boys who are every walking twin cliche so many good authors can't seem to help themselves to perpetuate. As a twin myself: no we are not two parts of one person, no we cannot read each others minds, an no we want more company than just ourselves. In a novel that treats all its other characters with such human insight, this cliche was especially dissapointing and it is quite a harmful stereotype.

That being said, I otherwise still deeply reccomend this challenging but beautiful novel. Even if you are very familiar with climate change, it will make you see our world with new eyes :)

Pick it up if you want: realistic climate fiction, a plucky protagonist in her 60’s, fraught family dynamics as our main character figures out how to both survive a historic weather event on her own and how to live in the midst of our existential climate crisis.

This novel was extremely well executed. Tomkins does a brilliant job of portraying Roly, in her growing panic about climate change, as both rightly principled and exceedingly harder and harder to tolerate. This is a tension lots of us grapple with, and I haven’t met a character who quite nails the stakes of both climate change and personal relationships this well. (What to do about all the people who don’t agree with the clear ways we see to change the world for the better? How many of us are having those fractious conversations now?)

I’m not entirely sure the end of the novel gives a satisfying answer to how we are all supposed to get on in the midst of all this, but that might be part of the point.

Many thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Wilder Path is environmental fiction at its best, weaving evocative and immersive nature writing with a deep and emotional human story. As the Earth is shaken by a violent storm and anthropogenic destruction, so too is 67-year-old Roly, climate change worrier/warrior, shaken by grief, remembrance, regret. The Earth and Roly take from and give to each other, their paths irrevocably entwined, as she recalls twenty years of action and inaction that have led her to this moment. Yet, despite the overwhelming burden of climate change - on both Roly and the Earth - there is hope here too; as Roly meets her fate, no longer on the Earth but in it, she draws us all towards making the choice to take the wilder path. This is a deeply thought-provoking and moving piece of climate change fiction, lightly and tenderly written. I look forward to more from Deborah Tomkins.

Rosalie becomes trapped in a cave while out for a walk by the ocean in Britain. Her fight for survival is marked with memories of her life where she grapples with crippling grief over the death of her son and the consequences of her actions following his demise.

How isolating grief can become, both for a person and a way of life, is explored as Rosalie becomes a climate activist following her late son’s footprints to the point where it consumes her world.

Beautifully written I would be interested in reading more from this author.

3.5⭐️

Thank you to NetGalley and Aurora Metro Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

This is the kind of book that creeps up on you, you can’t put it down before one more page, one more chapter… what is Rosalie going to do next? Sometimes you feel empathy, sometimes annoyance, occasionally horror but you cannot look away.

Walking a coastal path goes wrong and Roly finds herself trapped. But it’s ok, she’ll be fine… but time goes on… she passes time thinking about her dead son and how little we actually know and understand people. She has a husband who loves her but cannot understand her grief ~ and especially cannot understand the ways she chooses to honour their son.

It’s beautiful, it’s haunting, and it really makes you think about family, and love, and what matters in life. It’s a book I’ll think on long after I’ve closed it.

I was given a copy of the book by NetGalley

A beautiful book. Tender, twisting and turning. Life seen through the eyes of a mother haunted. So beautifully written and full of surprises. Thank you so much to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.