David Rees-Thomas

In the South Welsh town of Caerphilly, the hills remember what the streets try to forget. Abigail, estate agent with deep family roots, carries a childhood scar and a restlessness she cannot name. Rhian, supermarket manager and member of a sprawling local family, feels the growing weight of every path she never took. They meet through the Caerphilly Warblers, a small birdwatching group that climbs the same mountain each week.
As the five walkers move through wind-scoured light and sudden silences, the town below begins to feel strangely thin. Concrete and chapels and vape shops laid thinly over something older and half-forgotten. In spare, present-tense prose that drifts between the lyrical and the uncanny, Pilgrim Through This Barren Land follows two women as small moments accumulate into something profound: a scar touched in passing, a hymn carried on the wind, a gray figure glimpsed on the skyline.
Some truths only reveal themselves when you stop looking for them. For readers of Jon Fosse and Thomas Morris. The first volume in The Hymn Book series.