Hermit

Reviews

Written with often startling beauty, Hermit is an intimate account of the healing power of solitude. Though deeply personal, it explores universal truths about society and the human condition. A brave, brilliant and important book. I loved Hermit, hoovered it down in a day. Jade Angeles Fitton's life - from barns to huts to islands - is cleverly, brilliantly but honestly recorded. her search for boundary lines between herself and the beauty of the world is both engaging and true. She leaves us with an intense emotional understanding both of contemporary loneliness and the hermit's older companion, solitude - that state in which 'every living thing knows a secret.' In Hermit, Jade Angeles Fitton embarks on a heroic quest of self-discovery, creating in the process a beautiful, sensitive work about the challenges and solace of the natural world. Fitton brings heart, body and soul to this compelling story of deliberate living. A book about solitude - hers and other people's - that runs rich with love for the natural world In Hermit, Fitton has actually created that very thing for which she yearns: a place of serenity and calm and reflection. Reading it, I felt the overheated racket of the world recede, even as I attained further knowledge of its workings. It's a forest glade of a book: a hidden shore; a moorland escarpment where the voices you hear are the only ones that truly matter. It's a peace not reached without struggle and fight, which is true of all the best and necessary things. A book of spellbinding brilliance by a writer of rare talent. A dreamy, beautiful book about the consolations of solitude. In Hermit, Jade wanders a sunlit, windswept, delicately drawn landscape of loss and longing, and in doing so finds the stillness at the centre of herself. Hopeful and open-hearted. This distinctive, alluring memoir, reminiscent of The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, relates how Fitton slowly learns to live alone and celebrate solitude in the natural world. A compelling, engrossing memoir that beautifully encapsulates the human experience (both the misery and the magic) of suddenly finding yourself rebuilding life from the ground up, alone. I loved it. Hermit is a beautiful written debut memoir drawing on the hermetic tradition that shows the power of being alone. Expand reviews