Heavy Time

In Heavy Time psychogeographer Sonia Overall takes to the old pilgrim roads, navigating a route from Canterbury to Walsingham via London and her home town of Ely.

Vivid in her evocation of a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall’s secular pilgrimage elevates the ordinary, collecting roadside objects – feathers, a bingo card, a worn penny – as relics. Facing injury and interruption, she takes the path of the lone woman walker, seeking out ‘thin places’ where past and present collide, and where new ways of living might begin.

‘It is a talisman of a book. Heavy Time doesn’t just describe a pilgrimage, it becomes one, for both writer and reader. It is an invitation to resist ‘busyness’, to think of ourselves as explorers, to seek out ‘the everyday divine’. It has sent me out looking for ‘thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.’ Beautiful and essential.’

- Helen Mort

Author Biography

Sonia Overall is a writer, psychogeographer and Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, where she runs the MA in Creative Writing. Her publications include the novels A Likeness and The Realm of Shells, and the poetry collection The Art of Walking. She is the founder of the Women Who Walk network of walking artists and academics, and an occasional musician, mummer and puppeteer.