Elowen

In 2017 William Henry Searle and his wife Amy lost their baby, Elowen a few days before their due date. In the weeks that followed, unmoored by sadness, what they discovered was that there was no established vocabulary for losing a child. Elowen charts the story of how a love for the natural world sustained Will and he began to live with his grief.

In the summer of 2017, Will and his wife Amy lose their baby, Elowen, a few days before their due date. After a traumatic induced birth, they return from hospital to their cottage in the New Forest, grief-stricken and struggling to make sense of what happened to them. Unmoored by sadness, what becomes clear in the weeks and months following Elowen's death is that there is no established vocabulary with which to understand this experience, either for Will or the people around him. Indeed, as he discovers, there is no word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child. Without any linguistic or emotional scaffold, the disorientation of his grief feels ever more lonely and alienating. Elowen charts the darkness of Will's grief over the course of two years with unflinching honesty, but it also describes in sonorous prose what sustained him: the natural world, and in particular the silence and attentiveness of tracking wolves in the forests of Sweden. These animals, only ever fleetingly seen, nonetheless provided profound solace, and in the act of searching for them he began to find a way to live with his grief. This profoundly moving, ultimately uplifting book challenges the way we think about loss and help us to re-evaluate our relationship to the natural world. Elowen is not only a remarkable portrait of grief, but also an impassioned hymn to the wild and a treatise on the restorative potential of nature in uncertain times.