num_pages: 291
description: A grieving widow feeling disconnected from life discovers a most unexpected obsession--hunting for mushrooms--in a story of healing and purpose.Long Litt Woon moved to Norway from Malaysia as a nineteen-year-old exchange student. Soon after her arrival she met Eiolf. He became the love of her life. After thirty-two years together Eiolf's sudden death left Woon struggling to imagine a life without the man who had been soulmate and best friend. Adrift in her grief Woon signs up for a beginner's course on mushrooming. She finds to her surprise that the hunt for mushrooms and mushroom knowledge rekindles her appetite for life awakens her dulled senses and provides a source of joy and meaning.The Way Through the Woods tells the story of two parallel journeys: an inner one through the landscape of mourning and an outer one into the fascinating realm of mushrooms--resilient adaptable dizzyingly diverse and essential to nature's cycles of death and rebirth. An anthropologist and certified mushroom expert Woon brings a fresh eye and boundless curiosity to the natural world and takes readers from primordial Norwegian forests to hidden-in-plain-sight Central Park pathways. She also introduces a lovable and eccentric cast of mushroom obsessives. Her explorations of the connections between humans nature grief and healing are universal.
language: English
title: The Way Through the Woods: Of Mushrooms and Mourning
publisher: Spiegel & Grau