'The Green Hill' Sophie Pierce
“Sophie Pierce takes us to a place that none of us wants to visit. But there we discover extraordinary riches – riches that will transform us. This is a book about what it means to be a human, and that, we find, is a high, deep, demanding calling, of terrible beauty.” Charles Foster, New York Times Bestselling author of Being a Beast.
In 2017, Sophie Pierce’s life changed forever when her 20-year-old son Felix died suddenly and unexpectedly. Thrown into a new world of loss, she had to find a way to keep on living. Her book, The Green Hill: Letters to a Son, was published in March 2023.
In a series of letters to Felix – composed during walks and swims taken close to his grave on The Green Hill in Devon– Sophie learns how to live in the landscape of sudden loss, navigating the weather and tides of grief.
The book celebrates the natural landscape and the role it plays in our lives and relationships, as well as looking at how we consider our own mortality. The Green Hill, Felix’s burial place by the River Dart, comes to symbolise the issues that become important in the journey of grief: nature, beauty, a sense of place, the passing of the seasons, the earth and the fact that ultimately all we are is dust.
