At the Heart's Farthest Edge

By Jan Fortune

In October 2020, as new lock downs were implemented, Jan Fortune moved from a beloved home of twenty years in North Wales to a tiny hamlet in a forest in Finist re. Isolated during lockdowns, facing major unforeseen house renovations, illness and bereavement, she was also training as a herbalist while juggling work.

Constantly, she asked herself: What are you doing here?

How had a moment in a church gazing at a stained glass window as a four-year-old, a friendship between two girls who role-played their way through seven years as people from 10th century Moorish Spain, a thirty-one year volatile marriage, work-place assaults, a heart-changing encounter with herbalism and a new relationship led to this place in the seventh decade of life?

At the Heart's Farthest Edge unravels a series of cusp moments so slight they might have vanished unnoticed, yet in retrospect make sense of following a call to a forest in a new land and language, exploring herbalism, creativity and the ways in which we might live a small life well in this beautiful, wounded world.

Friendship, motherhood, love, making art and the natural world collide with the times we live in to produce a love letter to moments that persist across years, shining with joy or the sheen of tears, revealing how our deepest stories matter.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1788641930
• ISBN13: 9781788641937
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Cinnamon Press
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"