Thunderstone: Finding Shelter from the Storm

(Paperback)

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Description

There is just one object I want to carry inside the van It was believed lightning would not strike a house that held a thunderstone. I place this fossil on the windowsill, its surface gleaming like cats eyes ahead of me on a dark road.

In the wake of a traumatic lockdown, Nancy Campbell buys an old caravan and drives it into a strip of neglected woodland between a canal and railway. There is no plumbed water; no electricity point; walls as thin as a Kinder egg. But it is the first home she has ever owned.

As summer begins, Nancy embraces the challenge of how to live well in a place in which possessions and emotions often threaten to tumble, clearing industrial junk from the soil, forging unconventional friendships off-grid and helping the wild beauty surrounding her to flourish.

But when illness and uncertainty loom once more, she has to find a way to hold on to beauty and wonder, to anchor herself in this van, this safe space, this new home.

An intimate journal across the space of a defining summer, Thunderstone is celebration of the people and places that hold us when the storms gather; a soul-shaking journey that reminds us what it is to be alive.

Reviews

This raw, honest account of semi-urban caravan life offers a valuable lesson in how to find beauty and wonder even in the most trying of circumstances [Nancy Campbell] is wonderfully alert to every nuance of every experience, and writes with joyous precision about the summer she sees unfolding all around her. Scotsman

A many-splendoured book, which is at once an after-love, ever-loving letter to her ex; a real-time journal to keep herself company and emotionally intact; a worked-over piece of literary art (Campbell writes beautiful prose) and a rich newcomer to the latest and most exciting department of place writing. Horatio Clare, Spectator

Author Bio

Nancy Campbell is a poet and non-fiction writer whose books include Fifty Words for Snow, a Waterstones Book of the Month; The Library of Ice: Readings in a Cold Climate; Disko Bay and How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic. Her work has engaged with the environment since a winter spent as Artist in Residence at the most northern museum in the world on Upernavik in Greenland in 2010. She was appointed Canal Laureate by The Poetry Society in 2018 and received the Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 2020. She lives in a van outside Oxford.