Pilgrim Through This Barren Land

In the South Welsh town of Caerphilly, the hills remember what the streets try to forget.Abigail, estate agent with deep family roots, carries a childhood scar and a restlessness she cannot name. Rhian, supermarket manager and member of a sprawling local family, feels the growing weight of every path she never took.They meet through the Caerphilly Warblers, a small birdwatching group that climbs the same mountain each week. As the five walkers move through wind-scoured light and sudden silences, the town below begins to feel strangely thin. Concrete and chapels and vape shops laid thinly over something older and half-forgotten.In spare, present-tense prose that drifts between the lyrical and the uncanny, Pilgrim Through This Barren Land follows two women as small moments accumulate into something profound: a scar touched in passing, a hymn carried on the wind, a gray figure glimpsed on the skyline.Some truths only reveal themselves when you stop looking for them.For readers of Jon Fosse and Thomas Morris.The first volume in The Hymn Book series.