In Road to True North, British author Sarah Holding follows a father and son travelling around Iceland at a turning point in both their lives.
The story blends adventure, music and emotional recovery, with the journey itself shaping the characters’ development as much as the events they face.
Holding is an established children’s and young adult writer whose previous work spans time-travel adventures and speculative fiction.
With this latest novel, she turns her focus to contemporary themes, placing a teenage protagonist in unfamiliar surroundings and exploring how travel, friendship and landscape can influence confidence and perspective.
A Journey Inspired
Set against glaciers, open roads and coastal scenery, the book draws heavily on real locations and the experience of travelling through Iceland.
The country is not just a setting but an active presence in the narrative, reflecting shifts in mood and momentum as the characters move from place to place.
Iceland Review spoke with Sarah Holding about her inspiration for the novel, writing Iceland for young readers, and why the country lends itself so naturally to stories about change and direction.
- Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got into writing and working as a full time author?
I’d always loved writing when I was at school and as a hobby, but I chose to study architecture at university. Then I became a university lecturer after I graduated, and so it wasn’t until my mid 40s when my children were getting into reading that I started writing fiction full-time.
- At its heart, this is a story about a father trying to fix his son and failing. Why are we so drawn to stories about parents who get it wrong?
Great question, I think we’re always worrying as parents about the impact our decisions and behaviours are going to have on our children, and so watching someone—in this case Sean, who’s a hardened drinker—misread his own child and overreact to him in such a way that you see the harm it’s doing in the moment, gives the reader an intimate experience of flawed parenting in action.
- Iceland is more than a backdrop – it feels like a character in the novel. Why was this the right landscape for these emotional journeys?
Iceland is a country that makes you feel your emotions more strongly.
The beauty of the landscape is so raw and wild, and the people you meet are so smart and honest, that for me it’s a place where your unexplored inner world is thrown open whether you like it or not. Where you have to be on your toes at all times when travelling just to deal with the weather and the remoteness.
So it’s the perfect place for a relationship to unravel and be forced to seek new footholds.
- Which locations in Iceland feature in your story, and what about these places called out to you specifically?
Back in 2015, I undertook a two-week driving trip around Iceland with my family, but the route we took travelled clockwise around Iceland, and went as far north as Ísafjörður.
When I was planning Road to True North, I wanted my characters to experience Vík, Jökulsárlón and the south coast first, and then go anticlockwise around the country, to give the right pacing to the story.
At the lagoon, when Olly drinks 1000-year-old melted glacier water, it serves as the inciting incident for his road to recovery from depression.
In Seyðisfjörður, father and son bond a little and mend a few cracks, they then visit Sean’s old boss in Húsavík—a remote town I really love—and then in Akureyri, Olly has some highly formative experiences and finally finds his voice.
I wanted the two of them to talk about and circumnavigate the foreboding Highlands in the interior until finally something snaps and Sean takes off there with disastrous consequences.
- You set the novel at that fragile moment between adolescence and adulthood. What makes that threshold such a dangerous and fertile place for storytelling?
It’s a difficult transition for any teenager to make, especially now after the pandemic which has precipitated an epidemic of mental health issues.
So I felt drawn to write how it feels for two people that are struggling to communicate but who are forced by circumstance to reassess things that have been going wrong in their lives.
It’s dangerous because at any moment either party can lash out and do or say something irreparable, and it’s fertile because as a writer you can capture many unsaid things that evade or run counter to the dialogue.
- Olly and Sean are both in crisis, but in very different ways. Who was harder to write, and why?
Olly is coming to terms with his sexual orientation, an experience of first love that is painful and preoccupying, and as an only child, dealing with the various ways he feels he has let his parents down.
Instead of receiving support, and being seen and heard by his father, he is hectored and challenged and infantilised by a man who thinks he’s doing great but is falling woefully short.
The challenge in writing was to keep it short and sharp without being obvious, and to achieve this the narrative shuttled back and forth in a close-third voice from one character to the other, even within the same scene, so the reader gets inside both their heads.
While Sean’s inner world is narcissistic and self-serving, Olly’s is a place of self doubt and recrimination, but by the end of the novel I wanted the reader to feel compassion for both of them, and to find the small but seismic shifts in their relationship believable.
- Do you see this kind of story as a way of opening conversations with young people – particularly those who might feel misunderstood or prematurely defined by a single failure or diagnosis?
Yes, I do.
In fact, my publicist is currently pitching Road to True North to secondary schools with the idea of using the novel in a different way to the usual creative writing workshops that I offer, as part of what we call PSHE in the UK—the curriculum that covers personal stuff, including sex, health, money etc.
I think that using Road to True North to explore such topics will make it less threatening for students, because the workshop is looking at emotionally-charged issues through the lens of two fictional characters.
Instead of just taking the boy’s side, the experience of the dad can be considered too, which I think will prove very insightful and helpful for students and elicit productive discussion.
- What else are you working on and did this book change what you want to explore next as a writer?
Writing Road to True North was an experiment in moving my work towards contemporary realism while retaining a strong connection to the natural environment that my earlier novels are known for.
I wrote the entire first draft in under a month while on a writer’s residency in Finland, which also made me want to continue writing in a more richly focused way as it seems to lend an emotional depth to my work.
I am currently writing a warm, bittersweet novel whose main narrator is experiencing dementia and slowly losing their grip on reality.
It is loosely based on my father’s experience with memory loss and fluctuating mental capacity before he died, and I hope it will resonate with many readers.
SARAH HOLDING is the author of six novels for children and young adults, including Road to True North, Blackloop, Chameleon, and the SeaBEAN Trilogy. She divides her time between living and writing in England and Japan. Road To True North is available to buy now.
