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Extraordinary stories from ordinary people

Jade Angeles Fitton

A dreamy, beautiful book about the consolations of solitude. In Hermit, Jade wanders a sunlit, windswept, delicately drawn landscape of loss and longing, and in doing so finds the stillness at the centre of herself. Hopeful and open-hearted.

Cal Flyn, author of 'Islands of Abandonment'

A compelling, engrossing memoir that beautifully encapsulates the human experience (both the misery and the magic) of suddenly finding yourself rebuilding life from the ground up, alone. I loved it.

Hermit is a beautiful written debut memoir drawing on the hermetic tradition that shows the power of being alone.

A book of spellbinding brilliance by a writer of rare talent.

This distinctive, alluring memoir, reminiscent of The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, relates how Fitton slowly learns to live alone and celebrate solitude in the natural world.

Written with often startling beauty, Hermit is an intimate account of the healing power of solitude. Though deeply personal, it explores universal truths about society and the human condition. A brave, brilliant and important book.

I loved Hermit, hoovered it down in a day. Jade Angeles Fitton's life - from barns to huts to islands - is cleverly, brilliantly but honestly recorded. her search for boundary lines between herself and the beauty of the world is both engaging and true. She leaves us with an intense emotional understanding both of contemporary loneliness and the hermit's older companion, solitude - that state in which 'every living thing knows a secret.'

In Hermit, Jade Angeles Fitton embarks on a heroic quest of self-discovery, creating in the process a beautiful, sensitive work about the challenges and solace of the natural world.

Fitton brings heart, body and soul to this compelling story of deliberate living. A book about solitude - hers and other people's - that runs rich with love for the natural world

Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep

In Hermit, Fitton has actually created that very thing for which she yearns: a place of serenity and calm and reflection. Reading it, I felt the overheated racket of the world recede, even as I attained further knowledge of its workings. It's a forest glade of a book: a hidden shore; a moorland escarpment where the voices you hear are the only ones that truly matter. It's a peace not reached without struggle and fight, which is true of all the best and necessary things.

A fascinating odyssey through the origins and practice of solitude, fused with Fitton's profoundly affective personal journey, which immerses the reader in both the wild landscape's mythology and its healing potential. A beautiful, chimeric book.

A stirring and evocative meditation on the human urge for solitude across the centuries, which subtly blends memoir and nature writing with a journalist's eye for detail and a poet's clarity of vision.

Hermit is as much a story of escape as one of finding one's place in the landscape. A blend of memoir, nature writing and a re-examination of women throughout history who have sought solace in solitude, Jade Angeles Fitton has written a stunning and original book about loss, love and overcoming one's demons.

A memoir of finding freedom in a wild place

'I never imagined that the wind would blow me here, to a kind of isolation I have never experienced... There is never anything out here but my shadow, that no one treads on any more' 
 
When Jade's partner leaves the barn that they moved into just weeks before, he leaves a dent in the wall and her life unravelled. Numbed from years in a destructive, abusive relationship, she faces an uncertain future and complete solitude. Slowly, with the help of Devon's salted cliffs and damp forested footpaths, Jade comes back to life and discovers the power of being alone. 
 
As Jade reacclimatizes, she considers what it means to live alone. Through conversations with other hermits across the world, Fitton sheds light on the myriad - and often misunderstood - ways of living alone: from monks to hikikomori, and the largely ignored female hermit. Jade questions whether hermitic living is possible in an era of constant communication and increased housing costs as she finds herself financially unstable and itinerant. She realises that home doesn't exist within walls, but within the landscape of her childhood home county. 
 
Lyrically written, this is an inspirational story of recovery, of finding home, and of celebrating solitude in the natural world.

Articles featuring Jade Angeles Fitton

Extraordinary stories from ordinary people

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