2 It was also the best-selling hardback book. Joyce's first novel, it was a long-list finalist (top 12) for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 1 and Joyce won the UK National Book Award for New Writer of the Year for the book. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is a novel by Rachel Joyce, published in 2012.

I suppose I am like Harold you dont always have to understand why you are doing something. So this is what I have discovered-and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. Book Review: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. I had no idea-as I sat in my shed, surrounded by pieces of paper, with a head full of words-that the book could make such a journey. I met a lovely man who told me he would not read my book because it had no trains in it, and a woman who said nothing, who simply held my hand and cried. They have told me about book group discussions and the people with whom they have shared the story-lost friends, parents, children. Readers have written to me about their experiences of travel, of friendship, of marriage, of loss, and tragedy too. (I think the shiny ones get quite enough attention.) I wanted to write about the small acts of kindness, the conversations where words do not even tip the surface of feeling, the courage and bravery of everyday things. In writing about Harold and Maureen with their terrible unspoken secret, and all those people that Harold meets as he walks to save a friend's life, I was trying to celebrate the ordinary people. Paddington actor Jim Broadbent ’s latest movie, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, tells the story of how one man deals with his grief by going on a long walk along the length of England.

I have spoken before about how this story began as a radio play that I wrote for my father when he was dying of cancer, but I have had far less opportunity to describe its publication as a novel-and the people I have met since then. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry has become an international bestseller.

The unlikely pilgrimage of harold fry