The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

[3] A film adaptation of the same name starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton was released in the UK on 28 April 2023.

Harold Fry, 65, has cut the lawn outside his home at Kingsbridge on the south coast of Devon when he receives a letter.

A girl at the petrol filling station where he stops for a snack says something that acts as a catalyst for his nascent project.

From stopping places he sends postcards, to his wife Maureen, to Queenie, and to the unnamed girl at the filling station who gave him inspiration for his journey.

Mick, it appears, works for the Coventry Telegraph, and Harold's story of modern pilgrimage was soon everywhere, including Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4.

In the last stages of his walk Harold becomes badly disorientated, wanders around west of Berwick, sending home postcards from places like Kelso.

But when he at last reaches the hospice where Queenie has been waiting, he decides not to go in, and the reader is told, by means of a confessional letter to the girl at the filling station, of another motive for the walk.

His son David, unemployed after Cambridge and addicted to drink and drugs, committed suicide in the garden shed, where he was discovered by the father with whom he barely ever communicated, and whose life is now a protracted mourning.

Finally, Harold changes his mind and goes to the sick room to find Queenie unable to speak and at the point of death.

She sees in the window the shining quartz pendant he brings, her letters of reminiscence have confessed her lifelong love.

The obscure sacking incident is now a rampage, unexplained and unprovoked, where Harold smashes a set of glass clowns given to boss Napier by his mother.

[4] According to Matthew Richardson in The Spectator, Joyce manages the "balancing act of embedding homespun philosophy [...] without being twee".

[5] Ron Charles in The Washington Post compared Harold Fry's journey to "Walter Mitty skydiving" and "J. Alfred Prufrock not just eating that peach, but throwing the pit out the window, rolling up his trousers and whistling to those hot mermaids".

[6] Alfred Hickling, reviewing the novel for The Guardian, wrote that "[u]ltimately, the success of Joyce's writing depends less on the credibility (or otherwise) of what actually happens, so much as her unerring ability to convey profound emotions in simple, unaffected language".

[7] Janet Maslin, who reviewed it for The New York Times, called the book "sentimental" with "a premise that is simple and twee", but concludes that "it is very much a story of present-day courage".