The Walk Home

A Novel

Look inside
Stevie hasn't set foot in his home town for years, and he can’t decide whether to let his family—what’s left of them, anyway—know he’s back. He wasn’t the first to cut and run—in their own ways, his mother, his father, and his uncle all fled before he did—but should he be the first to come home? 

Moving between Stevie’s life as a construction worker in present-day Glasgow and the story of his parents when they were young, The Walk Home is a heartbreakingly powerful novel about the risks of love, and the madness and betrayals that can split a family. Gripping, haunting and, ultimately, hopeful, here is a piercingly honest story about the journey home—and the people there waiting for you.

“A brilliantly compelling and powerful work, told in beautiful, lean prose.” —The Economist

“Against a backdrop of religious and political divisions, Seiffert’s even prose is melodious.” —The New Yorker

“Intelligent and sophisticated.” —The Times (London)

“Seiffert continues to go from strength to strength. . . . As flinty and gritty as its characters and their vernacular. . . . Seiffert’s tragedy grips while it disturbs and its emotional punch makes it worth persevering until her bitter end.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A sort of fictional reportage illuminating the life and work of those invisibly holding our cities together. . . . Glimpses into the new Glasgow bring both the book and the city to life.” —Financial Times

“A brave, beautiful novel.” —The Guardian (London)

“Seiffert’s ear for speech patterns seems as excellent as you’d expect from a novelist brought up bilingually. . . . [She has a] finely tuned sense of the idea of home in all its seductiveness and fragility. . . . Written with great skill and control.” —Sydney Morning Herald

The Walk Home may take place in Glasgow, but it is universal in its narrative pursuit. And the sparse emotion of the story’s ending will leave a crack in even the most impassive of hearts.” —Toronto Star

“Riveting. . . . Further proof of Seiffert’s enviable talents as a writer. . . . While the conflict in which her characters are trapped might be ugly, the men and women are captivating.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)

“Deftly drawn and perceptively observed.” —Daily Mail (London)

“An engrossing domestic drama. . . . Seiffert’s writing is both tightly controlled and almost orchestral in its sweep. You feel every emotion deeply. . . . A rare novel.” —Irish Independent

“Exquisitely pared down prose by a writer who really feels for her characters and the tainted lives they are living.” —The Herald (Scotland)

“Deeply moving. . . . As heart-breaking as it is heart-warming, this delicate and powerful novel will stay with you long after the final page.” —Irish Examiner

“Full of intelligence, heart and compassion. . . . A tale of the urban working classes; where they draw their strengths from, their history and where they find dignity. . . . Seiffert has a superb ear for language.” —Scotland on Sunday

“Thought-provoking. . . . Seiffert illuminates historical and political issues through harrowing personal drama.” —Publishers Weekly

“Energetic, persuasive and lively . . . Seiffert’s brio and talent are once again amply on display.” —Kirkus Reviews

3

The girl came as a shock. It took Brenda a while to adjust: a girl was the last thing she’d expected from Graham.
 
He was Brenda’s youngest, by a few years, a big baby with a big head; oh ho, a troop cometh, Malky said. Graham was a happy accident, who never stopped eating, never stopped growing. He was the quietest of their four sons, but also the tallest, and the widest. Overnight he couldn’t do up the buttons on his school shirts, his socks forever showing where his trousers were too short. Graham was a gentle lad, and a comfort, but a bit too backwards in coming forwards, so Brenda fretted about him some school mornings, after she’d dropped him at the gates: hard to see him sidelined at the railings till the bell went.
 
She and Malky used to talk about him last thing at night, in bed, lights out. Brenda said she watched all the other boys tearing about, and Graham standing there like he didn’t know how. Malky said he’d learn, give him time. So she’d held her tongue when Graham joined his first band.
 
It wasn’t that Brenda liked it, but it was just about the first thing he’d joined in with. And she knew plenty boys who’d done the same: her older sons’ school pals, and even Malky, before they were married and he’d settled to driving his cab. Malky reckoned it was just a scheme hazard, part of life if your life was lived in Drumchapel. He said boys will be boys, they’ll always want to belong, and he teased Brenda too: he said it was her blood coming through. Her Dad had been an Orangeman, true blue, forever nursing the wounds of his Free State youth; aw the faimly woes, they all lead back tae Ireland. But Malky was a sweet man, mostly, and he could tease without being hurtful, so Brenda trusted him when he told her flute bands were forever springing up and then folding, and Graham would grow out of it, same as he had.
 
Graham was thirteen when he started. He got himself a paper round to pay for his uniform, and Brenda didn’t know that it was worth it: all he did was bash the cymbals. But the months went by with him saving, and then the Glasgow Walk rolled round, as it always did, just ahead of Ulster; first Saturday in July she sent him off with a good breakfast, if not her blessing, and then Graham came home again towards tea time with his face all shining. Wide-shouldered and even taller in his new uniform trousers. He said how folk on the scheme had cheered them, and followed them all the way into town, and how the lodge they’d played for had paid them too, like no one had told him that’s how it worked. Graham saved his cut, in any case, and then he took on a second round, because he could manage two paper bags, one across each shoulder. He did that for months. Earned himself enough for a drum. Just second-hand, but he chose a good one, Malky said so: he remembered that much from his own band days.
 
The drum got Malky worried too, Brenda could see that, because he went out and made enquiries. He even went along to practice, to see where this was headed, and have a quiet word to Geordie. He was the bandmaster, and an Orangeman too, but one of the decent kind. Malky told Brenda his band had been going decades, no headcases allowed: Geordie only kept folk that could hold a melody down. He didn’t like a drum to be battered, the way they did in the blood-and-thunder bands, he said it should be played, and he taught Graham the difference. So for a while there, they breathed a bit easier.
 
Only it turned out Graham was quick to learn, and quick to get poached by other bands. It was a new lot he went to Tyrone with: none of them much over twenty, not one of them with an ounce of sense. The idiot bandmaster reckoned the Glasgow Walk was just a warm-up to get the marching season started. The real deal was over in Ireland on the Twelfth, so he’d talked some country lodge into hiring them, and it was a worry from the outset, the whole enterprise.
 
Brenda looked the town up in the atlas that used to be her father’s. It was just a thumbprint’s distance from Portadown, where they didn’t just remember the Battle of the Boyne each July, they fought it against their neighbours all year round. She told Malky it was too much like the place her Dad was born in; she’d grown up hearing all Papa Robert’s stories, of the Irish Civil War and what came after, when the Free State turned out to be anything but, and the family fled across the water. Plus she’d had two sons in the army, and endured their Ulster tours of duty, so there were just some place names that set Brenda on edge. The folk around those parts were unyielding. Not just the Catholics, with their residents’ groups, stirring the bloody soup, but her own kind too: staunch. No thought of surrender allowed there. They all had their reasons, turned rigid over centuries of grievance, but Brenda said if no one bent, then someone was bound to break, and she didn’t want it to be their boy.
 
She’d gone to meet Graham off the coach, when it drew up outside the snooker club, hours late, and it was bucketing too. He was a sight: looked like he’d spent the three days drinking himself red-eyed. Relief made Brenda run off at the mouth, and she gave the older boys in the band a piece of her mind, until they put her straight:
 
“A braw lassie wae red hair doon tae her bum, missus. Nothin tae dae wae us.”
 
 
It took days to get any sense out of Graham. He sat there with his dinner plates untouched, his eyes all small and sore in his big face. The phone kept going, every few hours, call box calls from far-off Tyrone, and Graham lay on the sofa pining after the next one, a great soft lump. Young love. Malky said it would pass, give it a month. But one morning, a bit more than a month later, Graham was gone. His bed was made, and a note taped to the kettle: back themorrow. And he was too, with Lindsey, who was seventeen and six weeks pregnant.
 
 
It floored her; Brenda wasn’t going to deny it. But there they were, standing hand in hand in her kitchen, both smiling so much she could feel the happiness off them, like heat.

© Charles Hopkinson

Rachel Seiffert’s first novel, The Dark Room, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, won the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize, and was the basis for the acclaimed motion picture Lore. She
was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003; in 2004, Field Study, her collection of short stories, received an award from PEN International. Her second novel, Afterwards, and her third, The Walk Home, were both long-listed for the Orange/Baileys Prize for Fiction. In 2011, she received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Seiffert’s books have been published in eighteen languages. She lives in London with her family.

View titles by Rachel Seiffert

About

Stevie hasn't set foot in his home town for years, and he can’t decide whether to let his family—what’s left of them, anyway—know he’s back. He wasn’t the first to cut and run—in their own ways, his mother, his father, and his uncle all fled before he did—but should he be the first to come home? 

Moving between Stevie’s life as a construction worker in present-day Glasgow and the story of his parents when they were young, The Walk Home is a heartbreakingly powerful novel about the risks of love, and the madness and betrayals that can split a family. Gripping, haunting and, ultimately, hopeful, here is a piercingly honest story about the journey home—and the people there waiting for you.

“A brilliantly compelling and powerful work, told in beautiful, lean prose.” —The Economist

“Against a backdrop of religious and political divisions, Seiffert’s even prose is melodious.” —The New Yorker

“Intelligent and sophisticated.” —The Times (London)

“Seiffert continues to go from strength to strength. . . . As flinty and gritty as its characters and their vernacular. . . . Seiffert’s tragedy grips while it disturbs and its emotional punch makes it worth persevering until her bitter end.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A sort of fictional reportage illuminating the life and work of those invisibly holding our cities together. . . . Glimpses into the new Glasgow bring both the book and the city to life.” —Financial Times

“A brave, beautiful novel.” —The Guardian (London)

“Seiffert’s ear for speech patterns seems as excellent as you’d expect from a novelist brought up bilingually. . . . [She has a] finely tuned sense of the idea of home in all its seductiveness and fragility. . . . Written with great skill and control.” —Sydney Morning Herald

The Walk Home may take place in Glasgow, but it is universal in its narrative pursuit. And the sparse emotion of the story’s ending will leave a crack in even the most impassive of hearts.” —Toronto Star

“Riveting. . . . Further proof of Seiffert’s enviable talents as a writer. . . . While the conflict in which her characters are trapped might be ugly, the men and women are captivating.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)

“Deftly drawn and perceptively observed.” —Daily Mail (London)

“An engrossing domestic drama. . . . Seiffert’s writing is both tightly controlled and almost orchestral in its sweep. You feel every emotion deeply. . . . A rare novel.” —Irish Independent

“Exquisitely pared down prose by a writer who really feels for her characters and the tainted lives they are living.” —The Herald (Scotland)

“Deeply moving. . . . As heart-breaking as it is heart-warming, this delicate and powerful novel will stay with you long after the final page.” —Irish Examiner

“Full of intelligence, heart and compassion. . . . A tale of the urban working classes; where they draw their strengths from, their history and where they find dignity. . . . Seiffert has a superb ear for language.” —Scotland on Sunday

“Thought-provoking. . . . Seiffert illuminates historical and political issues through harrowing personal drama.” —Publishers Weekly

“Energetic, persuasive and lively . . . Seiffert’s brio and talent are once again amply on display.” —Kirkus Reviews

Excerpt

3

The girl came as a shock. It took Brenda a while to adjust: a girl was the last thing she’d expected from Graham.
 
He was Brenda’s youngest, by a few years, a big baby with a big head; oh ho, a troop cometh, Malky said. Graham was a happy accident, who never stopped eating, never stopped growing. He was the quietest of their four sons, but also the tallest, and the widest. Overnight he couldn’t do up the buttons on his school shirts, his socks forever showing where his trousers were too short. Graham was a gentle lad, and a comfort, but a bit too backwards in coming forwards, so Brenda fretted about him some school mornings, after she’d dropped him at the gates: hard to see him sidelined at the railings till the bell went.
 
She and Malky used to talk about him last thing at night, in bed, lights out. Brenda said she watched all the other boys tearing about, and Graham standing there like he didn’t know how. Malky said he’d learn, give him time. So she’d held her tongue when Graham joined his first band.
 
It wasn’t that Brenda liked it, but it was just about the first thing he’d joined in with. And she knew plenty boys who’d done the same: her older sons’ school pals, and even Malky, before they were married and he’d settled to driving his cab. Malky reckoned it was just a scheme hazard, part of life if your life was lived in Drumchapel. He said boys will be boys, they’ll always want to belong, and he teased Brenda too: he said it was her blood coming through. Her Dad had been an Orangeman, true blue, forever nursing the wounds of his Free State youth; aw the faimly woes, they all lead back tae Ireland. But Malky was a sweet man, mostly, and he could tease without being hurtful, so Brenda trusted him when he told her flute bands were forever springing up and then folding, and Graham would grow out of it, same as he had.
 
Graham was thirteen when he started. He got himself a paper round to pay for his uniform, and Brenda didn’t know that it was worth it: all he did was bash the cymbals. But the months went by with him saving, and then the Glasgow Walk rolled round, as it always did, just ahead of Ulster; first Saturday in July she sent him off with a good breakfast, if not her blessing, and then Graham came home again towards tea time with his face all shining. Wide-shouldered and even taller in his new uniform trousers. He said how folk on the scheme had cheered them, and followed them all the way into town, and how the lodge they’d played for had paid them too, like no one had told him that’s how it worked. Graham saved his cut, in any case, and then he took on a second round, because he could manage two paper bags, one across each shoulder. He did that for months. Earned himself enough for a drum. Just second-hand, but he chose a good one, Malky said so: he remembered that much from his own band days.
 
The drum got Malky worried too, Brenda could see that, because he went out and made enquiries. He even went along to practice, to see where this was headed, and have a quiet word to Geordie. He was the bandmaster, and an Orangeman too, but one of the decent kind. Malky told Brenda his band had been going decades, no headcases allowed: Geordie only kept folk that could hold a melody down. He didn’t like a drum to be battered, the way they did in the blood-and-thunder bands, he said it should be played, and he taught Graham the difference. So for a while there, they breathed a bit easier.
 
Only it turned out Graham was quick to learn, and quick to get poached by other bands. It was a new lot he went to Tyrone with: none of them much over twenty, not one of them with an ounce of sense. The idiot bandmaster reckoned the Glasgow Walk was just a warm-up to get the marching season started. The real deal was over in Ireland on the Twelfth, so he’d talked some country lodge into hiring them, and it was a worry from the outset, the whole enterprise.
 
Brenda looked the town up in the atlas that used to be her father’s. It was just a thumbprint’s distance from Portadown, where they didn’t just remember the Battle of the Boyne each July, they fought it against their neighbours all year round. She told Malky it was too much like the place her Dad was born in; she’d grown up hearing all Papa Robert’s stories, of the Irish Civil War and what came after, when the Free State turned out to be anything but, and the family fled across the water. Plus she’d had two sons in the army, and endured their Ulster tours of duty, so there were just some place names that set Brenda on edge. The folk around those parts were unyielding. Not just the Catholics, with their residents’ groups, stirring the bloody soup, but her own kind too: staunch. No thought of surrender allowed there. They all had their reasons, turned rigid over centuries of grievance, but Brenda said if no one bent, then someone was bound to break, and she didn’t want it to be their boy.
 
She’d gone to meet Graham off the coach, when it drew up outside the snooker club, hours late, and it was bucketing too. He was a sight: looked like he’d spent the three days drinking himself red-eyed. Relief made Brenda run off at the mouth, and she gave the older boys in the band a piece of her mind, until they put her straight:
 
“A braw lassie wae red hair doon tae her bum, missus. Nothin tae dae wae us.”
 
 
It took days to get any sense out of Graham. He sat there with his dinner plates untouched, his eyes all small and sore in his big face. The phone kept going, every few hours, call box calls from far-off Tyrone, and Graham lay on the sofa pining after the next one, a great soft lump. Young love. Malky said it would pass, give it a month. But one morning, a bit more than a month later, Graham was gone. His bed was made, and a note taped to the kettle: back themorrow. And he was too, with Lindsey, who was seventeen and six weeks pregnant.
 
 
It floored her; Brenda wasn’t going to deny it. But there they were, standing hand in hand in her kitchen, both smiling so much she could feel the happiness off them, like heat.

Author

© Charles Hopkinson

Rachel Seiffert’s first novel, The Dark Room, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, won the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize, and was the basis for the acclaimed motion picture Lore. She
was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003; in 2004, Field Study, her collection of short stories, received an award from PEN International. Her second novel, Afterwards, and her third, The Walk Home, were both long-listed for the Orange/Baileys Prize for Fiction. In 2011, she received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Seiffert’s books have been published in eighteen languages. She lives in London with her family.

View titles by Rachel Seiffert

National Depression Education and Awareness Month

For National Depression Education and Awareness Month in October, we are sharing a collection of titles that educates and informs on depression, including personal stories from those who have experienced depression and topics that range from causes and symptoms of depression to how to develop coping mechanisms to battle depression.

Read more

Books for LGBTQIA+ History Month

For LGBTQIA+ History Month in October, we’re celebrating the shared history of individuals within the community and the importance of the activists who have fought for their rights and the rights of others. We acknowledge the varying and diverse experiences within the LGBTQIA+ community that have shaped history and have led the way for those

Read more

Books for Latinx & Hispanic Heritage Month

Penguin Random House Education is proud to celebrate Latinx & Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs annually from September 15th through October 15th.  We are highlighting the works of our authors and illustrators from the Latinx and Hispanic community, whose stories and characters have a profound impact on our society. Here is a collection of titles

Read more