Ibrahim and Reenie

Ibrahim is walking from Cardiff to London. He has his reasons and he’s not doing it for charity. What he hasn’t counted on is bumping into seventy-five-year-old cockney Reenie doing the same thing, before he’s even reached Newport.

With her life’s luggage in a shopping trolley, complete with an orange tent and a cockatiel, Reenie is also walking from her Cardiff home to London, and not for charity.

A young Muslim ex-student with a tough few years behind him, Ibrahim is not looking for company that day. But when the police stop to check on him and Reenie on the grass verge by a hotel on the edge of town, he finds himself offering to share a journey that will take him places he had never dreamed of, starting with a night’s camping on the Coldra M4 interchange!

The odd couple soon attracts the attention of local journalists, one of a number of unexpected encounters that shape their route. But more life-changing is the relationship that builds between them. As Ibrahim and Reenie talk, their paths stretch out before and behind them into the personal and political turns of European history in ways neither could have foreseen.

An impressive and daringly human book from novelist David Llewellyn.