Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss and a Really Long Walk

Journalist Kessler (Free) recounts grieving the deaths of her husband and daughter in this moving memoir. The through line is Kessler’s journey along the Camino Francés, an ancient 500-mile pilgrimage route from Spain to France, which she took out of a need to “do something to separate the life I’d been living from the life that is now in front of me.” As Kessler details her trek, she shuffles in flashbacks about her personal losses, beginning with her husband, Tom, who died by assisted suicide after being diagnosed with an incurable cancer. As Kessler was mourning him, her daughter, Lizzie, died from a drug overdose. The narrative structure allows Kessler to build tension as she alternates between the pilgrimage and her family tragedies, with vivid sketches of her loved ones (Lizzie, in life, would “set herself on fire to keep someone else warm”) bumping against descriptions of verdant valleys, sleepy villages, 500-year-old stone houses, and more. Kessler is candid about her bitterness and impatience after Lizzie’s death, when she lashed out at acquaintances who offered her platitudes, but she also makes room for beauty, describing how she came to accept grief as “a new organ that has taken up residence in my body.” This leaves a mark. Agent: Heather Jackson, Heather Jackson Literary. (Feb.)