How is it that a story, in which hardly anything happens except for Harold nursing his blisters, can be so captivating, so thought-provoking, so moving?
Rachel Joyce has an unusual knack for interweaving past incidents and memories into the current narrative, while cunningly maintaining our suspense by concealing what really happened twenty years earlier until late in the book.
The episode when the others joined Harold on his pilgrimage I found rather unrealistic and superfluous, but the mental agony Harold went through in the following weeks – alone again, confused, weak and ready to give up – was brilliantly written. The final scenes are very touching.