The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Harold Fry, #1)

by Rachel Joyce

There were so many shades of green Harold was humbled. Some were almost a deep velvety black, others so light they verged on yellow. Far away the sun caught a passing car, maybe a window, and the light trembled across the hills like a fallen star. How was it he had never noticed all this before? Pale flowers, the name of which he didn’t know, pooled the foot of the hedgerows, along with primroses and violets.

“You’re a gentleman,” she said, spreading the word into two halves so that for the first time he saw it for what it meant: a gentle man.

The sun sparkled through the leaves of Cranham Woods and poured onto the beech carpet in a trembling filigree of light.