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Shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2025

What if losing your way is how a new path begins?

From the author of Wanderers: A History of Women Walking comes the story of one mother's journey from wilderness to freedom.

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After the upheaval of becoming a mother, walker Kerri Andrews finds herself carrying the idea that maybe the hills are no longer for her.

Yet, as she begins to uncover hidden stories of other mothers who've walked, she realises that there may be a way back to adventure - and herself.

So Kerri begins small, with walks along beaches and in cities, joined by women whose lives have also been reshaped by motherhood. And gradually, as her journeys grow bolder, drawing her to the valleys and peaks of her past, a new path begins to open. One that will offer the possibility of reclaiming both the mountains, and her freedom.

The result is an inspirational story for any mother who has ever felt the pull of the outside.

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'Left me itching to lace up my boots and follow the call of the path.' Laura Pashby, author of Chasing Fog

'Powerful and unflinchingly honest' Annabel Abbs, author of Windswept

'An invitation that will leave you desperate to step outside.' Resurgence & Ecologist

KERRI ANDREWS is a writer, walker and academic with a PhD in women's literature. She is the author of Pathfinding: On Walking and Motherhood; Wanderers: A History of Women Walking and the editor of Way Makers: An Anthology of Women's Writing About Walking, as well as the first ever collection of Nan Shepherd's letters. She lives in Scotland with her two young children, but it was in the Yorkshire Dales that she discovered the delights of walking, before falling in love first with the Lake District and then the Scottish mountains. She is a member of Mountaineering Scotland and has so far climbed over 120 of Scotland's Munros.