Set in and around Sedona, Arizona, in the late 1990s, Nomad by Cynthia Johnstone is a quiet, lyrical novel about grief, solitude, nature, animals, the sacredness of quiet daily rituals, second chances, and the unexpected ways life can bring us back to one another.
Above all, it is a book about healing that teaches us to carry the past within us, and about how some losses become part of us. Healing may begin with a piece of land, an animal, a book, a season, or simply the permission to be alone. Nomad shows our connection with the land and how our connections to older members of our families, through letters and books, can form a thread between generations. It is also about the meaning of companionship with the natural world and with animals as we move through life.
For me, Nomad is a soul-soothing, heartwarming novel that feels like a balm for a tired heart.
At the centre of the story is Corey Collins, whom we meet at twenty-eight, although much of her history emerges through her memories. When Corey is eighteen, her younger brother Damon dies as a result of their mother’s negligence. Corey had essentially raised him, taking responsibility for the house, the bills, the laundry, the dishes, and the everyday necessities of life. Their mother’s absence from motherhood and her lack of emotional support had forced Corey into a role that should never have belonged to a child.
The circumstances of Damon’s death are especially painful. Corey had always protected him and never left him alone with their mother. But one evening, she goes out. Damon dies on that one day while she is away. Although it was not her fault, Corey carries the responsibility as though it were. Grief becomes inseparable from her feeling of guilt.
After Damon’s death, Corey leaves Phoenix and Jack, the boy who had been her first love. Using a modest inheritance from her grandmother, she buys a small piece of land near Sedona. There is no running water or electricity, and little conventional comfort. Yet that is precisely what Corey needs.
“I drove until the land looked different and the air had rid itself of any lingering traces of my former life. (…) maybe this land was looking for me”.
Corey does not simply choose the land; she begins to feel that it has chosen her.
For ten years, she lives largely by herself, avoiding contact with other people. She dislikes small talk and prefers to be left alone. Instead, she finds comfort in the land’s predictable rhythms: pine-scented air, morning coffee on the porch, the greenhouse, chopped wood, changing weather, and the gradual movement of the seasons. She learns the land almost better than she knows herself: its sounds, scents, patterns, and habits.
The ranch is meant to protect her from the past and anchor her in the present. For a long time, it does. Her life is small, but it is not empty. She grows lettuce, chard, kale, butterhead, and arugula. She cans vegetables and makes jams, chutneys, pickles, vinegars, broths, and sauces. She chops wood and prepares for winter. Her days are governed by the seasons rather than by clocks, deadlines, or other people’s expectations.
There is something almost radical in this simplicity. Corey has stepped away from a world that failed her and created one in which she can decide what matters.
Solitude, grief and the quiet rituals of healing
Johnstone’s portrayal of solitude is not simply loneliness. For Corey, solitude is safety. Silence means peace and freedom from the unpredictable pain of other people. Johnstone also captures something truthful about the consequences that can follow a traumatic experience: emotional exhaustion. It is the exhaustion of carrying something unbearable for too long.
“I’m tired. Not the kind of tired, from a long day’s work but the tired that comes from a relentless, racing mind, an exhaustion that chips away, slowly breaking you down hour by merciless hour until you can hardly think straight.”
Corey has spent years living with Damon’s memory and the belief that she failed him. Her retreat into silence is therefore understandable. She needs somewhere that demands nothing from her. There is a certain modicum of tenderness in the way Johnstone allows Corey to remain in her solitude. Corey does not have to become sociable or suddenly embrace the world. Her solitude is respected.
Some of my most cherished passages in Nomad are the ones portraying the quiet daily rituals. They describe cooking, reading, preserving food, sitting beside a fire, or watching the sunset. There is something profoundly comforting about them.
“The transition in seasons means I will shift my efforts from the outdoors in. I will turn in earlier and spend my evenings cooking and preparing foods to be canned for the winter months ahead. I make apple chutneys and raspberry jams, pickles, vinegars, pumpkin purée, broths, and sauces, all canned tightly and placed into storage.”
The passage continues with evenings by the fire, reading by lantern, warm baths, and chilly nights. It is an ordinary life, but Johnstone makes it feel sacred.
Corey’s perfect day is similarly simple:
“I begin the process of slow roasting it [chicken] in a large pot among fresh herbs and spices from the garden. I bake a loaf of bread from scratch and harvest the last of the mesclun leaves for a salad. I pull the canned onions, radishes, cucumbers and carrots from my pantry…”
The kitchen fills with aromas. The light fades. Corey lights lanterns and candles.
“I grab my book and curl up in my reading chair with Nomad asleep at my feet, to await my dinner guest.”
What once felt like isolation is becoming a life capable of holding other people again and allowing others to share those moments with Corey.
Nature, seasons and the language of change
This movement from isolation towards connection is closely tied to Johnstone’s writing about nature. Her descriptions are lyrical. The Arizona landscape becomes almost another character, a silent presence that accompanies Corey through grief and gradually teaches her about change.
“The sun has begun its gradual descent, casting a golden hue over the Arizona landscape, almost blurring the land together. The scenery medicates me, as it always does, and soothes my jumpy nerves.”
Nature has a restorative and healing quality for Corey.
At another moment, she watches the day disappear:
“I watch the final hints of amber and orange melt away, giving in to navy, then finally black. I watch until stars that look like a million shimmering teardrops begin to appear, peppering the sky one by one.”
There is melancholy here, but also acceptance. The colours vanish only to be replaced by something else. Darkness is not the end of the landscape.
Autumn has a special meaning to Corey. She loves its quietness and the feeling that the world is preparing to withdraw.
“I love the way the wind shifts, carrying a faint bite that was not there just weeks prior. But most of all, I love silence. There is a hush that spreads over the land, coating it gently with a sense of peace, announcing its time to be still now; it’s time to rest.”
Corey recognises herself in autumn. She too has withdrawn and entered a period of stillness. Insects disappear into the earth, bees return to their hives, and birds migrate south. Nothing is trying to remain as it was.
“I treasure this transformation.”
Corey has spent years believing that grief destroyed her life. Gradually, nature teaches her to see transformation differently. This is one of the lessons Corey slowly learns from nature: endings are not always annihilation.
The death of an old tree does not make its existence meaningless. Its life has simply entered another stage. She notices the similarities between human life and that of plants and animals. Corey learns that stillness is not necessarily stagnation and that endings are not always final.
The land teaches Corey that life can continue after devastation.
Books, libraries and inherited wisdom
Books are another refuge for Corey.
“Books are really all I have, I read every night.”
Libraries hold a similar place in her imagination:
“I love being welcomed into one of my favourite places on Earth – a library…(…) For now, I’m nestled safely in one of my favourite places on Earth, the library.”
The library offers Corey what she values most: quiet, safety, knowledge, and the chance to enter another world without surrendering her own.
Her love of books is closely connected to her grandmother, one of the most important figures in her life. When her mother could not provide the care and emotional security she needed, her grandmother offered another model of existence: curiosity, culture, art, books, animals, and a love of nature. She represented the possibility of a different life. Through the letters filled with her grandmother’s stories and wisdom, Corey allows their relationship to continue beyond physical separation.
One quotation she leaves Corey comes from Great Expectations:
“Life is made of many partings welded together.”
Nomad is full of partings. Children grow up. Families fracture. Lovers separate. People move away. Circumstances change. Sometimes people who love one another are pulled apart by events beyond their control, and their lives continue separately even though the feelings never entirely disappear. Not every relationship ends because love disappears. Sometimes people simply drift into different lives.
Nomad and the possibility of connection
After ten years of solitude, a dog appears at Corey’s ranch. His name is Nomad, which is Damon spelled backwards. Because his name echoes Damon’s, his arrival also creates an unexpected connection to the brother Corey lost. It is as though the love she could not save has returned in another symbolic form.
Gradually, Nomad becomes much more. He protects Corey when she is in danger and brings another living presence into the sanctuary she has built. The silent ranch suddenly contains another heartbeat. Nomad seems to have found Corey because this is where he was needed.
The novel draws on Native American knowledge and beliefs, particularly those associated with the Hopi Nation, and explores the idea that animals can accompany human beings on spiritual journeys. Dogs, in particular, can help guide people towards the afterlife.
Within the novel’s emotional architecture, Nomad takes on an almost spiritual significance. He is not simply a dog but a companion, protector, and bridge between past and present.
Second chances
The novel’s lessons eventually extend beyond solitude. Corey’s first love, Jack, belongs to the life she left behind. Their story is shaped by grief, separation, and circumstance. Their lives progress independently, even though feelings remain. It is a reminder that life is not always linear. We leave places and people, build new identities, and assume certain chapters are finished. Sometimes, unexpectedly, something from the past finds its way back to us. Nomad does not suggest that a second chance means returning to exactly what existed before. It means the possibility of meeting again as different people.
Corey has changed. She has endured something that transformed her. The life she builds cannot be the life she might have lived had Damon survived, but it can still be a fulfilling life.
For me, the most beautiful part of Nomad is meeting Corey much later in life, sitting on her porch after her children have grown up and left the ranch to raise families of their own. She is still surrounded by the landscape that once offered refuge. She thinks about her grandmother, remembers the letters, and reflects on Nomad, the dog who appeared seemingly from nowhere and became part of her family. Looking back, Corey finally understands how important he was.
Corey, who once believed she had to disappear from the world in order to survive, eventually discovers that solitude and love do not have to be opposites. She can have the land and the people, the books and the family, the silence and the companionship, the past and the possibility of a future.
Conclusion
What I loved most about Nomad is that healing is portrayed as a quiet process through daily rituals and encounters: a dog arriving at the right moment, a book opened beside a fire, vegetables growing in a greenhouse, a sunset spreading across the red landscape, the first chill of autumn, a grandmother’s letter, or the simple knowledge that somewhere beneath the same sky, people we love still exist.
Johnstone’s writing reflects this kind of healing. Her prose is gentle and attentive to small changes. The novel’s emotional force comes from accumulation: the repeated rituals of cooking, reading, gardening, watching, and waiting.
“I’m up with the amber rise of the sun – the hour when coffee tastes best and my books come alive. The air still carries the night’s edge so I make a fire.”
Corey wakes up. She makes a fire. She reads. She tends the land. She watches the sunrises and sunsets. She continues. Continuing is itself an act of courage.
Nomad is a gentle book that understands that grief can push even loving people into solitude; that trauma can alter relationships; that people can love one another and still be separated by circumstance; and that the natural world can offer a language for losses human language cannot always express.
This is also a book about the unexpected places where life can find us: a ranch in the Arizona desert, a library, grandmother’s letters, a dog who arrives when he is needed, a person from the past .
Nomad offers a feeling of quiet companionship, reminding us that there are seasons when we need to withdraw, seasons when we need to grieve, and seasons when we are ready to let something new grow.
