The Way Back Home

Author/Guide: Freya North

Why a Booktrail?

2000s – Deep in Derbyshire on a quiet artists’ commune, you would think the living would be easy. But sometimes freedom comes at a price..

ISBN: 978-0007517800
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

Oriana Taylor has the life many people would only dream of. She lives in an artists’ commune full of weird and wonderful people in a rambling house with tangled shrubs all around. Life is one big adventure and freedom is their best friend.

But sometimes too much freedom can come at a price. Something happens when they are fifteen. She flies the commune not long after severed all ties with her family and moved all the way to San Francisco.

Now she is back.

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Travel Guide

A hippy commune in Derbyshire sounds ideal. The freedom, the sense of space and being able to be as free as a bird, do anything you want –

We were grouped together pretty much like clumps of perennials in the garden or the globs of paint on a palette in one of the studios or the music which drifted from the top rooms – discordant notes that , as a whole, wove together into a quirky harmony of sorts.

Windward, the house in the story may be fictional but the sense of the time there is evoked via the smell of paint, the colours on the walls, the music drifting down from the upstairs rooms. Stolen or faint chatter emanating from every nook and cranny. The sense of freedom and the lack of boundaries. Here she meets Jed and Malachy, brothers who both fall for her. When Oriana disappears she disappears from everyone and everything.

So to return from bohemian San Francisco and her lifestyle there must have been a tough move but a love affair gone bad can do that to a girl. Now back at home living with her mum (narcissistic Rachel) and stepfather Bernard. A new set up and a whole other set of challenges to face.

Back home she sees the brothers, the past comes back to haunt all of them. Her return makes her think of how small everything is here, like Lilliput, acutely small and making the rest of the world seem vast. Blenthrop may be a fictional location but as she drives she heads to Hathersage and so to really get a sense of the novel we need to head here on a booktrail.