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The cottage floor and the few pieces of furniture are covered in scraps of paper in what he takes to be his father’s handwriting. I go into these reads genuinely hoping to find a marmite-read that I find to be a delicious bitter-sweet delight.
When I sat down and read the final 100 pages in one sitting, I found I connected more with the rhythm and the cadences of the story. An unnamed protagonist suffers a double bereavement when their mother dies and their father goes missing in the Scottish Highlands, distracted with grief at the death of his wife. The bleak and inhospitable nature around her creates a stark background for our unnamed protagonists grief and guilt over her double loss; the loss of someone missing without resolve, and the loss of someone certainly gone for good. Yes, where I live, just over the water from Dundee, I can run up the hill at the back of the house and within five minutes I'm on to farm tracks and paths.It’s an unusual novel which creates a real sense of place and uses the encroaching natural surroundings to accentuate the narrator’s imploding mental health. Anxiety is an interesting word because, obviously, everybody has some anxiety and that's a normal reaction to certain situations. The novel chronicles its narrator’s attempt to piece together these texts and, hopefully, find a clue to their father’s whereabouts. Runner's World participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. In short: a bleak, disjointed “wandering” of text, that has a single message and “feeling” to convey.
And I've always used both of them in different but complementary ways to manage my mental health – to manage challenges that I have with anxiety, all of which is linked to being autistic, which is not something I knew about until a year or two ago. I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up Fray at Brome Lake Books; it seems to be a mystery with an appealing cover, and an Alan Cumming blurb the conjures up Masterpiece Classics.This is his debut novel, which he wrote over the course of several years in secret twenty-minute bursts, while on the bus to and from work (he missed his stop more often than he cares to admit!
Thoughtful, sharp, and deeply considered use of language that is both utterly captivating, and pulls off the trick of being both intense yet surprisingly accessible. I’m always impressed when the written word evokes strong feelings and emotions; perhaps made easier by the similarities between it’s story and mine. Throughout the first 40 pages or so, I was actually loving the atmosphere and the way the characters inner monologue unfolded. As both a runner and someone who loves the wild landscape of the Scottish Highlands this book transported me to a thoroughly engrossing world.This tale is beautifully rendered with a distinct style that brings the full range of emotions to the surface. It’s actually a wildly immersive exploration of grief, guilt, and mental illness, mediated by nature, running, and intentionality. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. During an anxiety experience, or a panic attack, there’s that feeling of not being able to catch your breath or feeling like you're choking and you just can't control it. The low rating indicates to me that it has at least done something unique and different and isn’t just a “mediocre people-pleaser”.
I ended up heavily skimming the main POV segments from about 65% on, then eventually skipped to the end and read the last chapter. There is a sense that both father and son are looking for “closure” on real events that have real or unreal consequences. My understanding of it is that it is about a son experiencing guilt followed closely by depression, after losing his parents, because he realises that he never really knew them. Equally, if on any given day, I'm struggling or my anxiety is sparking or I'm just feeling grey and depressed and overwhelmed for whatever reason, then 10 or 20 minutes of running will not fix it, but it will make it better.
The problem is that the same word also attached to people who may have extreme anxiety conditions that will totally derail their lives. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.
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