The Half Bird

Good Housekeeping recommended '20 uplifting memoirs by remarkable women', June 2024. Wanderlust magazine best travel books of 2024.

In 2016, Susan Smillie quit her job to sail round the British Isles aboard her beloved yacht Isean. Yet when it came to rounding the tip of Cornwall, she unexpectedly headed south, leaving home in her wake. Over the next three years she sailed the continent, living with only the basics she had aboard, by her wits, and via the kindness of the people and beauty of the coasts she encountered. But Susan's travels were just the beginning of her spiritual journey. Could she make the wild, unruly sea her home?

This is a lesson on how to live, how to heal, how to grow and how to fly. Smillie finds a freedom, beauty, and joy in amongst the rolling waves and shifting tides of loss, illness, and grief – a deeply inspiring story about the quiet strengths that reside within us all. As she discovers: we have no idea how much resilience there is inside us until we have to draw on it. We learn that we grow through adversity only as we go through it. That we crave happiness like plants leaning toward the light.