The Green Hill by Sophie Pierce

In 2017, Sophie Pierce’s life changed forever when her twenty-year-old son Felix died suddenly and unexpectedly. Thrown into an unimaginable new reality, she had to find a way to survive. By writing letters to Felix – composed during walks and swims taken close to his burial place by the River Dart – Sophie gradually learned how to live in the landscape of sudden loss, navigating the weather and tides of grief.

The Green Hill collects these letters alongside Sophie’s account of the years following Felix’s death, into which she weaves poignant memories of his life. What results is a deeply moving, beautifully captured record of how – amid the rivers and rocks of Dartmoor, and in the sea off the South Devon coast – Sophie was able to hold on to and nurture her bond with Felix, both in her mind and through a physical engagement with the landscape: actively mourning, rather than grieving.

This book is a celebration of the natural world and the role it plays in our lives and relationships, as well as an examination of how beauty and the passing seasons can help us contend with our own mortality. Above all, The Green Hill is one woman’s story of navigating through trauma and loss, and towards a fragile, complicated kind of joy.

Sophie Pierce is a writer and broadcaster who lives on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, where she loves to swim in rivers, lakes and the sea. For many years she worked for the BBC as a radio and TV reporter. She is the co-author, with Matt Newbury, of Beyond the Beach: The Secret Wild Swims of Torbay, Wild Swimming Walks Dartmoor and South Devon, Wild Swimming Walks Cornwall and Wild Swimming Walks Dorset and East Devon. @sophiepierce sophiepierce.co.uk