Setting out to walk the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route that
once secured ‘points’ for getting into heaven, ranked only after
Jerusalem and Rome in medieval times, forty-eight year old Rosemary
Wallace is already uneasy about whether she will fit in as a
pilgrim, whether her lack of preparation will defeat her before she
has started. When she is asked why she wants to walk the Camino.
Resisting the urge to reply ‘none of your damn business’ all she
can think is that she is walking because ‘I can’t go on this way or
that way or any way at all. I am just walking.’ What unfolds in
lucid prose that mirrors the pace of the walk, is an extraordinary
group of stories that interweave as step after step is taken.
Murielle’s Angel uncovers a life-changing feat of endurance with a
rhythmic heartbeat that quickens or steadies as particular
characters walk in and out of Rosemary’s story; an angry young man,
a tall blond stranger, an avuncular Spanish poet, Ria, a doctor
accosted by a man in the village of Casanova who wants her to be
his and wants a kiss ‘on account’, and the enigmatic Murielle,
whose drawings invert perception, who knows when to walk and when
to ride and whose doctor has given her the name of someone she will
need when the time comes. As Stefan curses aloud on alternate steps
to keep himself going and Dominic shares his exuberance about
returning to his home in Holland, to a celebration with family,
eleven brothers and sisters, wives, husbands, sisters, mother,
Rosemary can only muse on her shabby getaway from her own family,
her story, she thinks, ‘an everyday tale of dysfunction.’ But under
the relentless sun little can remain either everyday or hidden. As
the group make their way through lush fields and tiny hamlets,
barely changed since the first pilgrims walked by a thousand years
ago, changes are taking place in each of them; changes that will
shape not just this strange, highly charged walk, but everything
that comes next.
*Publisher: Cinnamon Press*
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