Books
The 10th Anniversary Edition of
In 2013, Australian filmmaker Bill Bennett walked the 800km Camino de Santiago, the famous pilgrimage walk in Spain. He wasn´t Catholic, he even doubted he was Christian. He certainly wasn´t a hiker or an adventure traveller.
He did the walk on a knee that an orthopaedic surgeon later said was bone-on-bone. And when he finally reached Santiago de Compostela he wondered why? Why had he put himself through such an ordeal?
So he wrote a book – The Way, My Way – in the hope that his reason for walking the Camino would reveal itself in his writing.
The book quickly became a must-read amongst the pilgrim community. Many regard it as the best book ever written about the Camino.
And now it´s a major motion picture.
This 10th year anniversary edition details the changes that Bill has undergone as a result of walking the Camino. With an additional 12,000 words, and reflections on each chapter with the wisdom of a decade´s hindsight, this anniversary edition once again will be a must-read for those contemplating walking the Camino, or for those that want to re-live the experience.
The Way, My Way
– Posts from a Blog that became a Book that became a Movie
By Bill Bennett
In 2013, Bill Bennett walked the Camino Frances – the iconic 800km ancient pilgrimage route across Spain. Before he left, he began a blog for a handful of family and friends.
He posted each day of his walk, and his following quickly grew exponentially, principally because of his quirky writing style, but also because he used the blog to explore his inner journey with brutal honesty, unafraid to explore his failings.
When he returned home, he wrote a book based on the blog posts. The book, called The Way, My Way, became an international best-seller. The book then became a highly acclaimed film.
This is a compilation of more than 200 blog posts from three of Bill’s Caminos – the Frances, the Portuguese, and the Via de Francesco in Italy. They detail such practicalities as preparation, gear, what he did right and what he did wrong – but above all it documents his spiritual growth and how the Camino fundamentally changed his life.
The Golden Bridge
By Bill Bennett
A man leaves home the morning of his wife’s funeral. He walks up to the main street, pulls cash out of his bank’s hole-in-the-wall, then he ditches his wallet, his phone, his watch, all his ID in a nearby dumpster. He wants to become invisible.
His name is Harry, he’s a structural engineer, he’d been married thirty-eight years. He loved his wife. And he killed her.
Harry has spent his working life building bridges. He’s a man fixed in his views. He’s defined himself by measurement and calculation and the certitude of the scientific method.
He decides to walk out into the centre of the desert, and along the way he meets a series of characters and he undergoes a fundamental change.
He’s told in a dream that to be reunited with his wife, he has to build a Golden Bridge of light over a huge red rock in the middle of the desert. She will be waiting for him on the other side.
The Golden Bridge is a powerful and deeply emotional story about one man’s remarkable journey into the heart of a country and into the centre of his soul.
Palace of Fires
The Palace of Fires trilogy is set in the world of modern-day witchcraft. A young girl’s mother goes missing, triggering her realisation that the world is not what it appears to be, and is far more evil than she ever thought possible. Books 1 & 2 in the series, Initiate and Unholy, were published by Penguin Random House in 2018. Book 3, Beast, was published in early 2019. According to the publishers, Palace of Fires is their largest selling Australian Young Adult title in several years.
Buy Palace of Fires – Initiate (Book 1)
Buy Palace of Fires – Unholy (Book 2)
Buy Palace of Fires – Beast (Book 3)
PGS The Book
By Bill Bennett
Bill Bennett heard a voice which saved his life. Determined to find out what that voice was, and where it came from, he went on a global search, speaking to some of the world’s leading experts on intuition, spanning science, religion and spirituality. The result was a highly acclaimed film, and now a book which expands on the film – and details how you can access and trust your intuition to help you make better decisions, and lead a more enriching life.
The way, My way
By Bill Bennett
“I’d never done anything crazy like this before – a pilgrimage walk. I was not a hiker, and I wasn’t a Catholic. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I was a Christian. On the last government census when I had to state my religion, I’d said I was a Buddhist, mainly because they’ve had such a hard time in Tibet I felt they needed my statistical support.
I was also not an adventure traveller. For me, adventure travel was flying coach. All this backpacking and wearing of heavy boots and flying off to France to walk ancient pilgrimage routes was a new experience, and not one that made me feel entirely comfortable.”
And so Bill Bennett, an Australian based film director, set off on an 800 kilometre walk across Spain to Santiago de Compostela, not sure why he was doing it, and not feeling entirely comfortable. His discomfort increased markedly a few days later when his knee gave out – so the rest of the walk was a “pain management pilgrimage.”
But he kept his sense of humour, and his memoir is at times hilarious but also deeply moving, and insightful. In the vein of Bill Bryson and Eric Newby, The Way, My Way takes you on a unique spiritual journey, and gives you a hearty laugh along the way.