I can’t recommend this book. Or I can recommend it but only if you don’t want to read a bike book as this is not really a bike book, even if most of it is about riding a bike.

This book is about former bike courier Emily Chappell racing the Transcontinental: an unsupported non-stop race across Europe. Every hour slept is an hour someone else could be riding so racers sleep little and peddle faster. It’s one of the world toughest tests of endurance. And Emily Chappell was the first female to win it. But if the book is about Emily and about the race, you need to also take a hint from its subtitle. The book is called “Where There’s A Will” but its subtitle is “Hope, Grief and Endurance in a Cycle Race Across a Continent” and the key word there is grief.

When I read this book I hadn’t read the sub-title and thought it was just about the race. When the grief arrive it was unexpected but, also to me, unwelcome as I thought it was turning the book into something else. No longer a sports biography but a memoir of grief. And I found the transition to be jarring, even though the grief was real and this was just a record of real events. It’s what actually happened – and should the author not cover everything that happened? Not just the unimportant but the vital and real aspect of friendship and loss?

For me, I had the wrong expectations and I bounced from the book at the point. So, I can’t recommend it. But, if you know what you are getting, and hopefully this review helps set your expectations, then maybe this one is for you.