Solo: Writers on Pilgrimage [Paperback]

Subtitled "Writers on Pilgrimage," this collection of travel pieces by 15 well-known writers takes the reader on journeys to a wide range of sites both far away and close to home. The most entertaining entry is Irish author Roddy Doyle's account of the bittersweet fortunes of his favorite soccer team in qualifying for the 1989 World Cup, which bubbles with Doyle's signature humour and beer swiller's dialogue. Another fine piece is Wendy Law-Yone's tale of travelling the spectacular old Burma Road 700 miles from China into Burma. Comparing two earlier "pilgrims," she states the Burmese way of life is "closer to Chaucer than Dante" and strikingly describes the tiny Peugeot in which she travels as having "the colour of an old tooth."

One author who actually addresses the nature of pilgrimage (along with editor Govier in her piece on Japan) is Margaret Atwood. Her section, titled "To Beechy Island," explores the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, which was lost while searching for the Northwest Passage in 1847. The piece is also something of an homage to Canadian writer Gwendolyn MacEwen, who died in the 1980s. While the collection will take the reader to the Himalayas, the Galapagos Islands, and the Australian bush, to a Spanish monastery for an experience of plainchant and to dangerous Somalia, a number of the pieces feel slightly tossed off, in particular entries by Douglas Coupland about playing solitaire on airplanes, Gail Singer on Hollywood, and Vijay Nambisan's fragmented view of a Hindu festival. Like any journey, this pilgrimage has its highs and lows. --Mark Frutkin

The strongest stories of place are often those that tell of a personal pilgrimage: journeys made under compulsion to wonder at nature, to a place of potent memory, a grave or home of a hero, to the site of a disaster or miracle.

In this compelling collection of essays, fifteen internationally acclaimed novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers share the personal journeys they felt impelled to make. Among them, Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood travels to the northern site where the members of the Franklin expedition perished. Roddy Doyle (Ireland) takes us to the 1989 World Cup. 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. Douglas Coupland takes us on an airplane. Ivan Klíma (Czech Republic), whose books and plays have been translated into 29 languages, visits the concentration camp where he was interned as a boy. Mark Kurlansky (U.S.), bestselling author of Cod and Salt, spends a week in a medieval monastery listening to plainchant. Wendy Law-Yone (Myanmar), author of The Coffin Tree and Irrawaddy Tango, follows the road that brought her Chinese and British ancestors to Burma. The Booker Prize-nominated Michael Collins (Ireland) writes of a foot race high in the Himalayas. And the editor of this collection, Katherine Govier, visits the grave of Miyamoto Musashi, the sixteenth-century Japanese sword master.

Katherine Govier is an acclaimed novelist, short-story writer and journalist, born and raised in Alberta and currently living in Toronto. She is the author of eight novels and three short story collections, and is the editor of two collections of travel essays. She is the winner of the Marian Engel Award (for a woman writer in mid-career) among other honours.