Thunderstone

‘There is just one object I want to carry inside the van… It was believed lightning would not strike a house that held a thunderstone. I place this fossil on the windowsill, its surface gleaming like cat’s eyes ahead of me on a dark road.’

In the wake of a traumatic lockdown, Nancy Campbell buys an old caravan and drives it into a strip of neglected woodland between a canal and railway. There is no plumbed water; no electricity point; walls as thin as a Kinder egg. But it is the first home she has ever owned.

As summer begins, Nancy embraces the challenge of how to live well in a place in which possessions and emotions often threaten to tumble, clearing industrial junk from the soil, forging unconventional friendships off-grid and helping the wild beauty surrounding her to flourish. But when illness and uncertainty loom once more, she has to find a way to hold on to beauty and wonder, to anchor herself in this van, this safe space, this new home.

An intimate journal across the space of a defining summer, Thunderstone is celebration of the people and places that hold us when the storms gather; a soul-shaking journey that reminds us what it is to be alive.

Author Biography

Nancy Campbell received the Royal Geographical Society Ness Award in 2020 for a decade-long creative response to the polar environment, which began during a winter as Artist in Residence at the most northern museum in the world on Upernavik in Greenland. Her books include Fifty Words for Snow, a Waterstones Book of the Month, The Library of Ice: Readings in a Cold Climate, and the poetry collection Disko Bay. She was appointed Canal Laureate in 2018, writing poems for installation across the UK waterways from London Docklands to the River Severn. Her memoir Thunderstone: Finding Shelter from the Storm describes making a home in an old Buccaneer caravan between the River Thames and the Oxford Canal, where she still lives.