‘Raw, intense and absorbing.’ MATT HAIG A memoir of place, belonging and compulsion I didn’t give my hands much thought before they turned against me. They’ve not attempted to snatch away my life in any literal sense – thankfully my unwell brain and its troubled, dexterous agents have never veered in that direction – but at the time I’m, we’re, writing this, it would not be untrue to say that they have been chipping away at my life, slowly, slowly, in a way I could never have predicted. When an unexpected, life-altering mental disorder upended writer Lauren Brown’s life, she knew the only way to get to the root would be to find the thread – wound, red, around trees, tangled and frayed in places – and start following it with her hands, hands that had betrayed her, back to the root. What emerges is not only an attempt to redirect the anxiety that’s pooled in her fingertips for as long as she can remember, released in odd bursts in caravan parks, on the north-east coast, in school assembly but a journey towards forgiveness, acceptance, and a love-song to the north.