Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ – Nancy Campbell’s partner suffered a stroke. Campbell’s life then became a hell of hospital visits, supporting and fearing for the brilliant Anna, an intellectual who worked with virus analysts in Moscow, reduced by brain insult and aphasia to a kind of infancy.
Thunderstone is the story of Campbell’s response to this crisis. Her diary extracts jump from Anna’s stroke in 2019 and her slow healing, to Campbell’s own new life, which begins when Anna is strong enough to be encouraged to move on, from June to September 2021.
Campbell is a poet and travel writer, with many friends and contacts. (I met her in 2018 at a nature writing conference in Munich, hosted by Robert Macfarlane, and she once stayed in my flat when I was away, sending by way of thanks an enormous kipper through the post, and bulbs for my son to plant.)
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