Thanks to Random House Publishing Group - Random House and NetGalley. I'll be thinking about the ending and that last letter to Harold for a long time. I would say do yourself a favor and read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry in order to fully experience just how meaningful the lives of these far from ordinary people were to those around them. I suppose that you could read Queenie's story on its own since it really is not a sequel but has been called a companion piece telling the story of their journeys simultaneously. This book is about living and dying with dignity, friendship, love, about regrets and acceptance, and how people have the capacity to make people who don't know them, fall in love with them. Harold's journey on the road and Queenie's journey waiting for Harold becomes theirs as well. A particularly moving scene was when Sister Mary Inconnu helps Queenie to feel and smell a peach and taste it when she didn't think she could swallow. They drink to Harold with their nutritional drinks and then the reality of it - Barbara wishes for 'one more Christmas '. The story at some point becomes about more than Harold's walk and more than Queenie's letter but about this group of patients and these lovely nuns especially Sister Mary Inconnu who types out Queenie's notes and gives her so much more.

Finty was my favorite as she takes to Twitter - #Harold Fry, #Queenie Hennessy, #hospice, #respect. The feisty and sometimes potty mouthed Finty, Pearly King, Barbara, Mr. But yet it was delightful to come to know some of Queenie's fellow patients who will make you laugh as well as cry. A dying woman is in hospice writing a letter seeking forgiveness.

There should be nothing light about this story. We learn so much about Queenie in her letter - about her childhood, her days at the university where she studied the classics, her losses, her time working with Harold and how she spent her days after leaving, living in a beach house and tending her beloved sea garden. At the same time, that man, Harold Fry is on a walking journey to see her before she dies.

Queenie is in a hospice spending her last days writing a letter to a man she worked with at a brewery in an English town. Rachel Joyce in this novel has answered all of the questions I had about Queenie and I now know that she was worth every mile that Harold walked and then some. While I was reading The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, I often wondered about who Queenie Hennessy really was and why Harold Fry would make a trek walking hundreds of miles to see her before she dies.

The love song of queenie hennessy