Can a tiny vehicle provide the space to rebuild a life? A beautiful, fearless memoir of uncertainty, self-discovery—and van life. ‘It was believed lightning would not strike a house that held a thunderstone. And so these fossils were placed on top of clocks, under floorboards, over stable doors . . . But there are some storms that thunderstones cannot prevent.’ In the wake of a traumatic lockdown, Nancy Campbell buys an old caravan and drives it into a strip of neglected woodland between a canal and railway. It is the first home she has ever owned. It will not move again. As summer begins, Nancy embraces the challenge of how to live well in a space in which possessions and emotions often threaten to tumble. She masters the van’s mysterious mechanics, but as empty passenger trains rumble past inches from the windows, rain and grief threaten to flood in. Yet soon, Nancy’s encounters with the community of boaters moored nearby, and their lessons in survival off-grid, prove fundamental. The wasteland burgeons into a place of wild beauty, as Nancy works to clear industrial junk and create a forest garden. And as illness and uncertainty loom once more, it is these unconventional relationships, this anchored van, that will bring her solace and hope. An intimate journal across the span of a defining summer, Thunderstone is a celebration of transformation; an invitation to approach life with imagination and to embrace change bravely. ‘Life-affirming, soul-shaking, heart-breaking… A book that reminds us what it means to be alive.’ Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author, Thin Places ‘This raw, honest account of semi-urban caravan life offers a valuable lesson in how to find beauty and wonder even in the most trying of circumstances… [Nancy Campbell] is wonderfully alert to every nuance of every experience, and writes with joyous precision about the summer she sees unfolding all around her.’ Scotsman ‘A ”many-splendoured book, which is at once an after-love, ever-loving letter to her ex; a real-time journal to keep herself company and emotionally intact; a worked-over piece of literary art (Campbell writes beautiful prose) and a rich newcomer to the latest and most exciting department of place writing.’ Horatio Clare, Spectator 'A memoir of great honesty and clarity, intimacy and subtlety, examining, among other things, illness and recovery.  It asks profound questions about the precarity of health, of art, and how to live through the storms of life with authenticity.’ Gavin Francis, author, Adventures in Human Being ‘If this is a story of grief and illness, loneliness and heartache, one is left with the feeling that here is a writer who knows better than most of us how to live.’ Helen Jukes, author, A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings Nancy Campbell is a poet and non-fiction writer whose books include Fifty Words for Snow , a Waterstones Book of the Month; The Library of Ice: Readings in a Cold Climate ; Disko Bay and How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic . Her work has engaged with the environment since a winter spent as Artist in Residence at the most northern museum in the world on Upernavik in Greenland in 2010. She was appointed Canal Laureate by The Poetry Society in 2018 and received the Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 2020. She lives in a van outside Oxford. When I was in my teens, I wanted to be either a poet or a haulier. I couldn’t decide whether it would be better to spend the nights writing revolutionary works of experimental literature and hosting bohemian parties or driving up a rain-lashed European motorway listening to classic love songs on the radio, then sleeping alone in the back of my truck, dreaming of a fried breakfast. Later, I wanted to be a location adviser for film (my only qualification, a good memory for places). Or establish a business that would invent new racehorse names for unimaginative stud owners. And always, secretly, concurrent with all these ambitions, the desire to be an estate agent. I loved games of Monopoly with the red and green houses and hotels the size of sugar cubes, so easily bought and mortgaged or sold. I day-dreamed over full-page adverts for stately homes in back issues of Country Life in the dentist’s waiting room. These promised a world quite unlike the string of rented dwellings my family flitted between. In the end my parents no longer bothered to unpack, and my father’s study was always a box room, that is to say it had books in boxes rather than on shelves, an arrangement that had the added benefit of creating a maze that anyone entering had to navigate to reach him. I have not managed to evade the family curse of boxes, but my upbringing helped me to see that a home can be a pit stop, not a prison, and perhaps like a caddis fly larva a carapace to be sloughed, the more frequently the better. It is no surprise that the first home I own should be both small as a sugar cube on wheels and its own form of country estate