Rachel Joyce is the author of the Sunday Times and international
bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The
Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, The Music Shop, Miss Benson's
Beetle, Maureen Fry & the Angel of the North and a collection of
interlinked short stories, A Snow Garden & Other Stories.
Rachel's books have been translated into thirty-six languages. The
Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the
Commonwealth Book prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The critically acclaimed film of the novel, starring Jim Broadbent
and Penelope Wilton, was released in 2023. Rachel was awarded the
Specsavers National Book Awards 'New Writer of the Year' in
December 2012 and shortlisted for the 'UK Author of the Year' 2014.
In 2024 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Kingston
University.
Rachel has also written over twenty original afternoon plays and
adaptations of the classics for BBC Radio 4, including all the
Bronte novels. She moved to writing after a long career as an
actor, performing leading roles for the RSC, the National Theatre
and Cheek by Jowl.
She lives with her family in Gloucestershire.
Joyce bestows tenderness and grace, revealing how forgiveness and a
reckoning with the past can transform the present for the
better.
*Mail on Sunday*
Joyce is a fearless explorer of emotional landscape; Maureen's
pilgrimage north becomes
a moving account of healing and acceptance.
*Sunday Times*
Exquisite and beautifully crafted
*Daily Mail*
A beautiful novella ... with compassion and tenderness ... the
novel's conclusion is deeply moving and life-affirming.
*Observer*
Very rarely, there is a writer who can touch the deepest and most
hidden parts of the soul, by using the everyday matter of our daily
lives to reveal the sacred that always surrounds us. This writer is
Rachel Joyce, and her trilogy starting with The Unlikely Pilgrimage
of Harold Fry, then The Love Song of Queenie Hennessy and finally
Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North does just that, as well as
delighting by her assured story-telling. To read her work is to
think at first you are being invited to a perfect and delicious
afternoon tea - then realise that you are intimate communion with
what it means to be human: to suffer, to love, and to be
understood. There is beauty, and the reason for art.
*Laline Paul*
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