Wayward: Just Another Life to Live is Vashti Bunyan's memoir, and her first book. White Rabbit, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, published it in hardback on 31 March 2022 at £16.99, with an ebook and an audiobook the same day and a paperback in July 2023. The audiobook is read by Bunyan herself and runs five hours and thirty-nine minutes. The hardback is 240 pages. Her own drawings and some of her lyrics appear in the book; she told the Guardian that both the lyrics and the drawings were her attempts to capture, preserve, and hold on to a fleeting sense of innocence, peace, or a specific moment in time.

She began the book in the mid-1990s, to explain to her three children why they had grown up the way they had, sent a synopsis to publishers and heard nothing back. It sat unfinished for twenty-odd years. She returned to it in the first Covid lockdown, after a friend asked what she was doing, and finished it then.

What it covers

From the publisher:

In 1968, Vashti Bunyan gave up everything and everybody she knew in London to take to the road with a horse, wagon, dog, guitar and her then partner. They made the long journey up to the Outer Hebrides in an odyssey of discovery and heartbreak, full of the joy of freedom and the trudge of everyday reality, sleeping in the woods, fighting freezing winters and homelessness. Along the way, Vashti wrote the songs that would lead to the recording of her 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day, the lilting lyrics and guitar conveying innocent wonder at the world around her, whilst disguising a deeper turmoil under the surface.

From an unconventional childhood in post-war London, to a fledgling career in mid-sixties pop, to the despair and failure to make any headway with her own songs, she rejected the music world altogether and left it all behind. After retreating to a musical wilderness for thirty years, the rediscovery of her recordings in 2000 brought Vashti a second chance to write, record and perform once more.

One of the great hippie myths of the 1960s, Wayward: Just Another Life to Live rewrites the narrative of a barefoot girl on the road to describe a life lived at full tilt from the first, revealing what it means to change course and her emotional struggle, learning to take back control of her own life.

— White Rabbit

Editions

There is no separate US edition. The White Rabbit hardback and paperback are sold in the United States under the same ISBNs; American listings give 3 October 2023 as the US paperback date.

Where to buy