'Funny, alert and sensitive' - The Tablet
ABOUT THE BOOK:
On Pilgrimage – British Edition
After twenty-eight years of family life, seven children raised, fifteen house moves and an operation for cancer, Jennifer Lash suddenly had the urge to go on a pilgrimage.
This book is a journey. She set out in bitter cold at the beginning of April and returned to the intense heat of summer. The places are as various as the people; places of contemporary Christian pilgrimage such as Lourdes, Lisieux and Taize. As well as the great gatherings of pilgrims there are numerous stops made alone; Vézelay, Le Puy, La Chaise Dieu high in the forests of the Auvergne, St Gilles. Finally there is the incredible celebratory phenomenon of Santiago de Compostela in the far north-west of Spain.
The variety of myths, legends, bones, springs, saints and images; the spaces of silence and the sounds that complement them, are found to be as present and powerful in Europe in the 1990s as they would have been to the mediaeval pilgrim in the twelfth or thirteenth century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jennifer Lash wrote her first novel The Burial at the age of 23 in 1961, and this was followed by four more over the next twenty years. She married Mark Fiennes and with their six children they moved between Suffolk, Wiltshire, Ireland and London. In 1986 she learned she had cancer and after a painful operation, embarked on a solitary pilgrimage through France to Santiago de Compostela. Throughout her illness she continued to write, leaving Blood Ties, perhaps her finest work, behind. She died in 1993.