All Over the Map

Eat, Pray, Love

Elizabeth Gilbert · 341 pages

This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cult

Under the Tuscan Sun

Frances Mayes · 287 pages

Now in paperback, the #1 San Francisco Chronicle bestseller that is an enchanting and lyrical look at the life, the traditions, and the cuisine of Tuscany, in the spirit of Peter Mayle's *A Year in Provence*. Frances Mayes entered a wondrous new world when she began restoring an abandoned villa in the spectacular Tuscan countryside. There were unexpected treasures at every turn: faded frescos b

My Life in France

Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme · 344 pages

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the coun

Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World

Rita Golden Gelman · 320 pages

The true story of an ordinary woman living an extraordinary existence all over the world. “Gelman doesn’t just observe the cultures she visits, she participates in them, becoming emotionally involved in the people’s lives. This is an amazing travelogue.” —Booklist At the age of forty-eight, on the verge of a divorce, Rita Golden Gelman left an elegant life in L.A. to follow her dream of trav

The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World.

Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett, Amanda Pressner · 551 pages

Three friends at a crossroads in their twenties quit their high pressure New York media jobs, leave their friends and everything familiar behind, and embark on a year-long backpacking adventure around the world.

Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents

Elisabeth Eaves

AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

David Miller · 256 pages

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

John Steinbeck · 256 pages

A quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to California's Monterey Peninsula To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the tress, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the

Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman

Alice Steinbach · 278 pages

"In the tradition of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea and Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun, in Without Reservations we take time off with Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Steinbach as she explores the world and rediscovers what it means to be a woman on her own."--BOOK JACKET.

Driving Hungry: A Memoir

Layne Mosler · 313 pages

"A delicious memoir that takes us from Buenos Aires to New York to Berlin as the author, driven by wanderlust and an unrelenting appetite, finds purpose, passion, and unexpected flavor. Layne Mosler's search for her next meal based on a recommendation from a cab driver starts in Buenos Aires: After leaving a tango club following a terrible turn on the dance floor, she impulsively asks her taxista

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot

Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment

Suzanne Morrison · 339 pages

"When Suzanne Morrison decides to travel to Bali for a two-month yoga retreat, she wants nothing more than to be transformed from a twenty-five-year-old with a crippling fear of death into her enchanting yoga teacher, Indra--a woman who seems to have found it all: love, self, and God. But things don't go quite as expected."--Page 4 of cover.

What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim: A Midlife Misadventure on Spain's Camino de Santiago

Jane Christmas · 288 pages

Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail

Suzanne Roberts · 262 pages

It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California’s John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts’s account

Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback (Vintage Departures)

Robyn Davidson · 280 pages

“I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes.... There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns…” For Robyn Davidson, one of these moments comes at age twenty-seven in Alice Springs, a dodgy town at the frontier of the vast Australian desert. Davidson is intent on walking the 1,700 miles of

An Age of License: A Travelogue

Lucy Knisley · 189 pages

Cartoonist Lucy Knisley got an opportunity that most only dream of: a travel-expenses-paid trip to Europe and Scandinavia, thanks to a book tour. An Age of License is Knisley's comics travel memoir recounting her adventures. It's punctuated by whimsical visual devices; peppered with the cats she meets along the way; and, of course, features her hallmark -- drawings and descriptions of food that wi

A Million Steps

Kurt Koontz · 198 pages

Kurt Koontz thought he was well prepared for his 490-mile walking trip on the historic Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain. He was fit and strong. He had a good guidebook and all the right equipment. His pilgrim passport would grant him access to the shelter of hostels along the way. But all that, however helpful, did not begin to encompass the grandeur of his external or internal adventu

Travels

Michael Crichton · 377 pages

Here is a record of Michael Crichton's astonishing adventures. It is a vision of travel not as escape but as exhilaration, as a testing of self, and as spiritual education. Crichton shows us travel as turmoil and as peace. All of this voyages, outward and inward, from his twenties to his mid-forties, have been journeys into awareness--leading him to the excitement and benison of direct expeirence

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Laurie Lee · 192 pages

It was 1934 and a young man walked to London from the security of the Cotswolds to make his fortune. He was to live by playing the violin and by labouring on a London building site. Then, knowing one Spanish phrase, he decided to see Spain. For a year he tramped through a country in which the signs of impending civil war were clearly visible. Thirty years later Laurie Lee captured the atmosphere o

The Road to Mecca

Muhammad Asad · 380 pages

This autobiographical work by one of Europe's best known convert to Islam gives us a rounded portrait of a man in search of adventure and truth. It is part spiritual autobiography, part summary of the author's intuitive insights into Islam and the Arabs, part an impressive travelogue. Punctuated with abundant adventure, moments of contemplation, colorful narrative, brilliant description and lively

Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

Brian Benson · 277 pages

"Brian Benson has a million life plans but no sense of direction. So when he meets and falls for Rachel, he's ready to go wherever she'll take him. In a whirlwind of new love, they embark on a bicycle trip from northern Wisconsin to western Oregon. As the pair progress through stunning landscapes, they contend with merciless winds, vivid characters, broken bikes and bodies--and the looming questio

Faery Tale: One Woman's Search for Enchantment in a Modern World

Signe Pike · 300 pages

A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure

Marlena de Blasi · 346 pages

American chef Marlena de Blasi and her Venetian husband, Fernando, married rather late in life. In search of the rhythms of country living, the couple moves to a barely renovated former stable in Tuscany with no phone, no central heating, and something resembling a playhouse kitchen. They dwell among two hundred villagers, ancient olive groves, and hot Etruscan springs. In this patch of earth wher

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer · 207 pages

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose