Join us for an evening with Kerri Andrews.
Doors open at 7:00pm and the event starts at 7:30pm
Free hot drinks will be available on arrival.
There will be an opportunity to buy books and get them signed afterwards.
£5 entry fee is redeemable against the price of the book. Should you wish to reserve a book please email us books@westwoodbooks.co.uk
About Kerri:
KERRI ANDREWS is a writer, editor, teacher and enthusiastic walker. She is the
author of the bestselling Wanderers: A History of Women’s Walking, and the editor
of the first-ever anthology of women’s writing about walking, Way Makers. Her
edition of Nan Shepherd’s Correspondence has been nominated for the 2024
Saltire Book Awards Research Book of the Year. She is a keen walker in the Scottish
hills (she has climbed 126 of the Munros) and in the Tweed valley, where she lives.
Kerri also teaches creative writing, and has previously worked as an academic at
Edge Hill University and the University of Strathclyde. She is the mother of two
small and energetic children, whom she is sometimes successful in persuading to
go for a walk.
About the book:
The desire to walk is something that defines us as human beings, bringing joy and
connection and freedom. But what happens to all this when we become mothers?
In the wake of the complete metamorphosis of becoming a mother, Kerri Andrews determines to undertake a series of journeys on foot to understand what has happened to her.
Alongside a backpack full of supplies, Kerri carries with her the shadow of post-natal depression and the idea that maybe the hills are no longer for those, like her, who bear the mental and physical scars of childbearing and childrearing. Yet, what she soon discovers are tales of mother-walkers that have long been neglected or hidden away. From Mary Wollstonecraft and Ellen Weeton to Kate Chopin, here are women whose post-partum stories are urgently pertinent as they show us how to
step into new ways of living with motherhood. As Kerri traverses urban, rural and increasingly mountainous landscapes in the North West and Scotland, she is joined by women who have also experienced the profound and sometimes devastating changes that having children can bring to bodies and minds. Together, they explore the
complicated ground of motherhood today – balancing enormous responsibility and upheaval with ambition, rage and hope – creating new paths as they go.
Melding history, landscape writing and memoir, Pathfinding is a deeply personal, brave and urgent exploration of what it truly means to rediscover ourselves through the land we walk and the people we walk alongside. Here are our fore-mothers who have pursued power and pleasure through their feet; here is an invitation to mothers today to set out and claim that same power and freedom.