At the Heart’s Farthest Edge —Jan Fortune
ISBN: 9781788641937
£19.99 (hardback)
‘…a gorgeous, dazzling, glimmering book’
‘A fascinating memoir, not like any other…’
‘…brings us back changed. A magical memoir.’
About at the heart’s farthest edge
In October 2020, as new lock downs were implemented, Jan Fortune moved from a beloved home of twenty years in North Wales to a tiny hamlet in a forest in Finistère. Isolated during lockdowns, facing major unforeseen house renovations, illness and bereavement, she was also training as a herbalist while juggling work.
Constantly, she asked herself: What are you doing here?
How had a moment gazing at a stained glass window as a four-year-old, a friendship between two girls who role-played their way through seven years as people from 10th century Moorish Spain, a thirty-one year volatile marriage, work-place assaults, a heart-changing encounter with herbalism and a new relationship led to this place in the seventh decade of life?
At the heart’s farthest edge unravels a series of cusp moments so slight they might have vanished unnoticed, yet in retrospect make sense of following a call to a forest in a new land and language, exploring herbalism, creativity and the ways in which we might live a small life well in this beautiful, wounded world.
Friendship, motherhood, love, making art and the natural world collide with the times we live in to produce a love letter to moments that persist across years, shining with joy or the sheen of tears, revealing how our deepest stories matter.
Praise for at the heart’s farthest edge:
This is a gorgeous, dazzling, glimmering book. A book of childhood and elderhood; love and loss; words and worlds. Interwoven with Jan’s achingly raw and deeply transformative memoir are poetic fragments depicting a place we can love; a home we can protect; a future for us all. Jan writes of this earth — plants, humans, animals, cosmos — in a way no one else does. I am hungry, as always, for more.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places & Cacophony of Bone
A fascinating memoir, not like any other I have read. The discontinuous timeline creates a rhythmic flow to the narrative, now in the present, now in the past, until the reader is given a living, three-dimensional portrait of a remarkable life, interwoven with a profound interest in herbalism and the natural world. It is, too, a story of extraordinary courage in the face so many adverse experiences, overcoming them with fortitude, and expressed without any trace of self-pity. A terrific book.
John Barnie, poet, essayist amd memoir writer,
most recently Ice & In the Shadow of the Yew (2026)Jan Fortune’s memoir glows with the warmth of a woman who has walked through life’s transformative fires and the wisdom of a writer who knows how to tell a spellbinding tale. Fortune’s lyrical language is shot through with the sparks and glints of the narrator’s deep insight, humor, and her appreciation for beauty — in people, in the small details, in the wide world. To read At the heart’s farthest edge is to accept Fortune’s invitation to an adventure that spans vast swaths of space and time, delves deep into the stories-within-stories that make us who we are, journeys to the heart’s far edge, and brings us back changed. A magical memoir.
Marya Hornbacher, New York Times Bestselling author of Wasted,
The Center of Winter, & Solo (Hachette, 2027).
Author biography
Jan Fortune is a writer, mentor and herbalist living in a forest in Finistère. She has a doctorate in feminist theology and is the founding editor of Cinnamon Press. Jan has taught writing courses across Europe and mentors writers. Her previous publications include creative non-fiction on the alchemy of writing, plus poetry collections and novels, most recently At world’s end, begin and smiling at grief in a house in a forest where life grows, Jan writes at the intersection of story, poetry and herbalism. You can follow her on Substack and on her website Terrain and she runs the writing community, ‘Kith: for a different story’
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