Everything changes everything Love, loss, and a really long walk : a memoir

Journalist Kessler (Free) recounts grieving the deaths of her husband and daughter in this moving memoir. The through line is Kessler's journey along the Camino Francés, an ancient 500-mile pilgrimage route from Spain to France, which she took out of a need to "do something to separate the life I'd been living from the life that is now in front of me." As Kessler details her trek, she shuffles in flashbacks about her personal losses, beginning with her husband, Tom, who died by assisted suicide after being diagnosed with an incurable cancer. As Kessler was mourning him, her daughter, Lizzie, died from a drug overdose. The narrative structure allows Kessler to build tension as she alternates between the pilgrimage and her family tragedies, with vivid sketches of her loved ones (Lizzie, in life, would "set herself on fire to keep someone else warm") bumping against descriptions of verdant valleys, sleepy villages, 500-year-old stone houses, and more. Kessler is candid about her bitterness and impatience after Lizzie's death, when she lashed out at acquaintances who offered her platitudes, but she also makes room for beauty, describing how she came to accept grief as "a new organ that has taken up residence in my body." This leaves a mark. Agent: Heather Jackson, Heather Jackson Literary. (Feb.)

After losing her husband and daughter in the same year, an author goes hiking in search of answers. About two weeks into hiking the Camino Francés, the famous pilgrimage route from France to Spain, author Kessler (Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home, 2022) and her fellow travelers encounter a group of nuns who wonder why they're making the grueling, 500-mile journey. Kessler's answer: "I need to do something to separate the life I've been living from the life that is now in front of me…And it needed to be something big." Not long before embarking on the hike, the author's husband of 30 years, Tom, became ill and ended his own life using a medical kit legalized decades earlier in Oregon, where they lived. Eight months later, the author's daughter, Lizzie, died of an overdose of methamphetamine laced with fentanyl, a symptom of an addiction the author believes began when her daughter entered a physically abusive relationship. To make sense of these enormous losses, the author committed to hiking the Camino. Kessler writes, "What I told myself was that I needed something hard to do that Ichose to do instead of something hard to do that came out of nowhere and gobsmacked me." Although the journey might not fully heal the author, it does teach her that grief is not something to overcome so much as something she must learn to live with for the rest of her life. "Grief is a new organ that has taken up residency in the body," she writes. "Sometimes it causes discomfort like an upset stomach. Sometimes it is a dull ache like a bum knee…You feel its weight. I will always feel its weight." A well-paced and affecting account of coping with great loss. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.