West: A Journey Through the Landscapes of Loss - Hardcover

Perrin, Jim

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20 ratings by Goodreads

9781843546115: West: A Journey Through the Landscapes of Loss

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1843546116 ISBN 13: 9781843546115

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2010

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'I am alone with my dead, and the grieving can begin. I am alone with my dead in a place of the dead, and I do not want to live. This is why I have come here - to be alone; to be in a place of the dead; to be at peace and undisturbed with my own dead.'

After the sudden, separate, deaths of his wife and son, Jim Perrin fled his native Wales for Ireland and to the furthest point of Connemara, to an ancient burial ground on an island off its westernmost peninsula. A journey embarked upon haphazardly, instinctively, led him solitary and at twilight to a remote beach strewn with human bones.

Consumed by the presence of death, he had come to a place of the dead, had felt the urge to travel West and wondered why? What was leading him to settle into this place and pass here the coming hours of dark, under the hollow gaze of ancient skulls? West is his extraordinary attempt to understand.

West tells the story of Jim Perrin's own life against the lives and deaths of his cherished wife and son, and the landscapes through which they travelled together. It is a powerful and passionate confrontation with loss, a seeking-to-understand the wilderness within, a meditation on transience, a complex, sensual and moving love-story and a celebration of the beauty and redemptive power of wild nature. In this book, Perrin has written a stunning, life-affirming evocation of the grief that can consume us all and the journey entailed in accepting and understanding devastating personal loss.

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Review:

'A beautiful, powerful and extraordinary book, full of extremes of nature and experience. WEST is an invigorating and frequently joyous reflection of what it feels like to be alive.' -- Tristan Gooley, author of THE NATURAL NAVIGATOR

'In this astonishing book, as much factual novel or epic prose poem as anything else, Jim Perrin takes us on a celebratory, often hilarious, yet profoundly moving, journey through an intricate weave of lives lived, loved and lost. In recalling his wife and son, he conjugates love, pride and pain into an eloquent reflection on grief and mortality.'
--Aonghas MacNeacail

From the Author:

Jim Perrin is one of Britain's most highly regarded writers on travel, nature and the outdoors and in his youth was one of the country's most notable rock-climbers. He is a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Climber and The Great Outdoors. Among many other awards he has twice won the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain literature, and was voted Scottish Columnist of the Year 2009. He has written twelve books to date, including Menlove, The Villain: A LIfe of Don Whillans, River Map, The Climbing Essays and Travels with The Flea. He is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy, an Honorary Fellow of Bangor University, and the Guardian's Country Diarist for Wales.

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