'I am alone with my dead, and the grieving can begin. I am alone with my dead in a place of the dead, and I do not want to live. This is why I have come here - to be alone; to be in a place of the dead; to be at peace and undisturbed with my own dead.'
After the sudden, separate, deaths of his wife and son, Jim Perrin fled his native Wales for Ireland and to the furthest point of Connemara, to an ancient burial ground on an island off its westernmost peninsula. A journey embarked upon haphazardly, instinctively, led him solitary and at twilight to a remote beach strewn with human bones.
Consumed by the presence of death, he had come to a place of the dead, had felt the urge to travel West and wondered why? What was leading him to settle into this place and pass here the coming hours of dark, under the hollow gaze of ancient skulls? West is his extraordinary attempt to understand. West tells the story of Jim Perrin's own life against the lives and deaths of his cherished wife and son, and the landscapes through which they travelled together. It is a powerful and passionate confrontation with loss, a seeking-to-understand the wilderness within, a meditation on transience, a complex, sensual and moving love-story and a celebration of the beauty and redemptive power of wild nature.
In this book, Perrin has written a stunning, life affirming evocation of the grief that can consume us all and the journey entailed in accepting and understanding devastating personal loss.
