The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country

In this affecting memoir, Schaap (Drinking with Men) traces her path forward after two devastating losses. In 2010, Schaap’s husband died of cancer; the following year, her mother died after a long illness. Schaap’s sorrow was compounded because she and her husband were separated when he first got sick and she and her mother had a strained relationship for most of Schaap’s life. After their deaths, Schaap struggled to keep her head above water until a reporting trip took her to Glenarm, a hardscrabble coastal village in Northern Ireland, where she was reminded she was in “a country striving day after day to surmount sorrows of its own.” She was so moved that, after returning home to New York City, she packed up and moved to Glenarm, forging tenuous friendships with her neighbors and investigating the region’s difficult history as a means of moving on. Schaap marries a reporter’s curiosity with a humorist’s eye for detail, matching bits of regional history with hilarious anecdotes about her husband and mother (of her mom’s shih tzu: “[He was] a sociopathic fuckup of a dog”). The result is a nuanced and poignant account of what comes after grief. Agent: Ashley Lopez, Waxman Literary. (Aug.)