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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.