Harold Fry, sixty-five and freshly retired, opens a letter one ordinary morning from Queenie Hennessy, a colleague he last saw twenty years earlier. She’s dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He scribbles a reply, ambles to the postbox, then walks straight past it. And the next one. By the time he reaches the garage forecourt he’s decided, on the strength of a few kind words from a girl selling burgers, to walk the entire length of England: 627 miles, in the yachting shoes he happens to have on his feet, in the belief that as long as he keeps moving, Queenie will stay alive.
I read Rachel Joyce’s 2012 debut and felt the particular envy of a writer watching someone build something enormous out of almost nothing. No spaceship, no time machine, no mysterious strangers. Just a retired man, a pair of unsuitable shoes and a long road north. The clever part is what the walk shakes loose: a marriage gone silent, a son barely mentioned, decades of small cowardices Harold has filed away and never reopened. So if you’ve turned the last page and you’re hunting for that same ache, here’s where I’d point you.
First, what Harold Fry is really doing
The walking is the least of it. Underneath the blisters and the kindness of strangers sits a much harder book about an ordinary man discovering, far too late, the size of a debt he never settled. Queenie once took the blame for something Harold did and lost her job over it; she vanished from his life, and he let her. The pilgrimage is penance dressed up as a gentle stroll. Keep that in mind, because every novel below runs on some version of the same engine: an unremarkable person, a reckoning deferred for years, and the slow thaw that follows once they finally set off towards it. It’s the late-life jolt I wrote about in the midlife wake-up call, only delivered by a postbox rather than a sports car.
The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce
Start with the obvious. Joyce wrote a companion in 2014 that tells the same story from the far end of the road. While Harold walks, Queenie lies in her hospice bed, and when she learns what he’s attempting she’s stunned. A volunteer suggests she write him a second letter, this one carrying the truth she never told him. Out it comes: the friendship beginning twenty-four years earlier in the brewery office in Kingsbridge, and her complicated, unclaimed love for Harold’s son David. It’s the rare companion novel that deepens the original instead of cashing in on it, and it answers the questions Harold’s walk leaves hanging in the air.
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
Ove is fifty-nine, Swedish, recently widowed and thoroughly finished with the world. Six months after losing his wife Sonja to cancer, he sets about joining her, methodically and with great attention to detail, only for a chatty young family next door to flatten his postbox and, by slow degrees, his resolve. Parvaneh, his new neighbour, keeps turning up needing things: a lift, a ladder, somebody to mind the children. Backman shares Joyce’s central trick of cracking open a grief-locked man with the people who simply refuse to leave him be. Funnier than Harold Fry on the surface, every bit as capable of ambushing you on a quiet evening.
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
Major Ernest Pettigrew, retired and sixty-eight, holds firm opinions on tea, decorum and the slow ruin of his Sussex village. The sudden death of his brother nudges him into friendship with Mrs Jasmina Ali, who runs the local shop and shares his love of books, and the village promptly fills with raised eyebrows. What looks at first like a cosy read turns into a comedy of manners with proper teeth, picking at class, belonging and who counts as a local after fifty years. Same quiet-Englishman-running-low-on-time territory as Harold, with a romance Pettigrew would never dream of admitting to out loud.
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper
Here is Harold’s pilgrimage given a Canadian accent and a coyote. Etta is eighty-three. One morning she leaves Otto, her husband of decades, a note explaining she’s gone to see the water, which she has never once laid eyes on, and sets off walking 3,232 kilometres across Saskatchewan towards the sea, armed with a rifle, some chocolate and her best boots. A coyote falls into step beside her; she names him James and he stays. Beneath the magical-realist shimmer sits the same machinery as Joyce: a very long walk that turns out to be a very long look backwards, at Otto, at the war, at their friend Russell. The talking coyote padding along behind a pensioner is either the finest or daftest thing in the book, depending entirely on the mood you read it in.
A Page in Your Diary by Keith A Pearson (yes, mine)
I’ll own the plug. I raise it because it shares Harold’s marrow even where the mechanism differs. Sean Hardy is in his fifties, back in his home town after decades away, when he inadvertently discovers what became of Jackie Benton: the girlfriend he dumped over the phone in May 1987 after he met someone at university. Then he’s handed a journey back to the days before a 1988 catastrophe wrecked her life, with a single task. Befriend her, keep his identity hidden, and steer her clear of it. Like Harold walking towards Queenie, Sean travels towards a woman whose ruin he had a hand in: a man trying to pay a debt he spent thirty years pretending he didn’t owe. No hospice, no Berwick, no yachting shoes. The reckoning lands in exactly the same spot.
Why a man in the wrong shoes won’t leave us alone
You could reasonably ask why these mild books about pensioners and postboxes sell in their millions while flashier novels slip out of print by Christmas. I think it comes down to the bill. Most of us carry the suspicion of an unpaid one somewhere back there: a phone call never returned, a friend we let take the fall, a kindness we meant to repay and somehow never did. Harold’s road, like the procession of strangers who change him along it, says the door might still be open. There’s a whole shelf of these, in fact, which I went into in the best books about a stranger who changes your life.
Harold cannot keep Queenie alive by walking. We work that out by about page forty, and so, eventually, does he. What the journey actually mends is Harold himself, and the marriage he assumed had quietly expired. That sounds like a greetings card written by a hospice. In Joyce’s hands it plays as something far truer: the discovery that the reckoning you’ve spent years dreading turns out, when you finally walk towards it, to be the thing that sets you free.
If that itch, the one that wonders whether the door’s still open, is why Harold’s road stayed with you, it’s the territory I keep wandering back into. The Last Stop Video Shop follows Kevin Kershaw, the achy side of fifty, divorced and quietly running out of road, who’s handed a VHS tape showing a childhood memory no camera ever captured. And A Page in Your Diary sends Sean Hardy back towards the woman he failed, hoping it isn’t too late to matter. Both arrive, like Harold’s letter, on an unremarkable morning that goes on to upend everything after it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry about?
Rachel Joyce’s 2012 debut follows Harold Fry, a newly retired sixty-five-year-old in Devon who opens a letter from Queenie Hennessy, a former colleague dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Setting out to post his reply, he keeps walking instead, convinced that if he covers the 627 miles to her on foot she will stay alive. The journey becomes a reckoning with his marriage, his estranged son and the regrets of a quiet life.
What books are similar to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry?
For the same blend of ordinary people, late-life journeys and long-buried regret, try A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson, and Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper. Rachel Joyce’s own companion novel, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, tells the same story from Queenie’s side of the road.
Do I need to read Harold Fry before The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy?
No. The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy runs parallel to Harold’s walk and stands on its own, telling Queenie’s version as a long letter from her hospice bed. Reading Harold Fry first adds weight and a few quiet revelations, though Joyce built the companion so it works either way round.
Is there a film of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry?
Yes. A 2023 British film directed by Hettie Macdonald stars Jim Broadbent as Harold and Penelope Wilton as his wife Maureen, with a screenplay by Rachel Joyce herself. It follows the novel closely and makes a gentle, faithful companion to the book.
Where should I start if I want something British and close to home?
A Man Called Ove offers the warmest, funniest way into this kind of story, even if it hails from Sweden. For something properly British, my own A Page in Your Diary sends a man in his fifties back towards the woman whose life he helped derail, swapping Harold’s long road for a debt he spends the whole novel trying to repay.