• McClelland & Stewart, 2003

In this compelling collection of essays, internationally acclaimed novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers share the personal journeys they felt compelled to make.  Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood travels to the northern side where the members of the Franklin expedition perished.  Nuruddin Farah, described by the New York Review of Books as “the most important African novelist to emerge in the last twenty-five years,” returns to his native, war-torn Somalia.  Orange Prize winner Kate Grenville (Australia) travels to the bush and the house of a convict ancestor.  Ivan Klima (Czech Republic), whose books and plays have been translated into 29 languages, visits the concentration camp where his family was interred.  Mark Kurlansky (U.S.), the bestselling author of Cod and Salt, spends a week in a medieval Dominican monastery.  Wendy Law-Yone (Myanmar), the author of The Coffin Tree and Irrawaddy Tango, follows the Burma Road.  The Booker Prize-nominated Michael Collins (Ireland) writes of a foot race in the Himalayas.  Erica Jong contributes an essay about her return to Venice.  The editor of this collection, Katherine Govier, visits the grave of Miyamoto Musashi, the sixteenth-century Japanese swordmaster.  All the material in this collection is original.