
Published: 01/08/2013
It was a world I’d never been to yet had known was there all along, one I’d staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I’d once been. A world that measured two feet wide and 2,663 miles long.
At twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything.
In the wake of her mother's rapid death from cancer, her family disbanded and her marriage crumbled. With nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America - from the Mojave Desert, through California and Oregon, and into Washington state - and to do it alone.
She had no experience of long-distance hiking and the journey was nothing more than a line on a map. But it held a promise - a promise of piecing together a life that lay in ruins at her feet.
[Wild is] ‘uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs, where the uplift makes you feel that you’re committing mental suicide. This book is as loose and sexy and dark as an early Lucinda Williams song. It’s got a punk spirit and makes an earthy and American sound.’ - The New York Times.
Publisher: Atlantic Books
ISBN: 9780857897763
Number of pages: 336
Weight: 326 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 23 mm
Edition: Main
MEDIA REVIEWS
'One of the best books I've read in the last five or ten years... Wild is angry, brave, sad, self-knowing, redemptive, raw, compelling, and brilliantly written, and I think it's destined to be loved by a lot of people, men and women, for a very long time.' - Nick Hornby
‘Big-hearted, keen-eyed, lyrical, precise...Cheryl Strayed reminds us in every line that if defeat and despair are part of human experience, so are kindness, patience, and transcendence.’ - George Saunders
'Epic and moving' - The Sunday Times
'Amazing and inspiring' - Nicole Kidman
'...funny and fierce' - Independent on Sunday
'Extraordinary... Truly wild: dirty, beautiful, serene' - Sunday Telegraph
'It's not very manly, the topic of weeping while reading... Wild pretty much obliterated me' - The Scotsman
'A deeply honest memoir about mother and daughter, solitude and courage, and regaining footing, one step at a time' - Vogue
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“Fantastic”
'Wild' is totally absorbing, well-written and inspirational. It made me laugh and cry, and I was sorry to reach the end of it. The account of the author's hike is gripping, and the personal back-story... More
“An Inspirational Memoir.”
What happens when you decide to do The Pacific Coast Trail (1100 miles of mountains and rough terrain) with no hiking experience and a shed load of an emotional baggage after the death of your mother? This book!... More
“Good Personal Memoir”
As Strayed sets off the Pacific Coast Trail, not only is her physical pack huge and heavy, but her metaphorical baggage is too. Her violent father left when she was six; her mother died of cancer when she was 22; she... More
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