A Life Of Discovery

One Day I’ll Fly Away by Nick Evetts is a poignant bittersweet contemporary novel that I enjoyed.

We follow a middle-aged man who is having a crisis of identity. He leaves his home and travels to the south west of England. We see a broken man who is transformed by kindness and compassion as a community figuratively nurses him back to health.

The fresh air of the Cornish landscape contrasts with the stifling urban landscape.

We are also privy to the life he left behind. We see a wife and two young children, struggling to cope without a husband and father.

There is a tension between the old and the new. We see that he is not a ‘bad’ man, just a broken and confused one. Neither is the wife ‘bad’. She is just a wife and mother existing from day to day.

What will happen in the end? Which life will the husband and father choose? You will have to read the book to find out!

JULIA WILSON