Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks


Amazon.com
As a little girl growing up in 1950s Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks dreamed of romance, adventure, and--most of all--being someplace else. In those days, Australia seemed like a provincial backwater, a place people left as soon as possible to really start living. Geraldine found two outlets for her frustrated spirit of adventure: a rich imagination and a variety of pen pals scattered across the globe. Her first "pen friend," Nell, lived just across town; her last, Joannie, was on the other side of the world, in America. In between, the young Geraldine Brooks lived vicariously through letters from an Israeli Jew, an Israeli Christian Arab, and a young French girl living in a remote region of the Vaucluse valley. As she grew older, Brooks lost touch with her pen friends, and a real-life career as a foreign correspondent in some of the world's hottest spots fed her craving for new experiences. It wasn't until her father's death, when she discovered all her old pen pals' letters among his things, that Brooks began to wonder how her correspondents' lives had turned out.
Foreign Correspondence is the best kind of travel memoir: one that takes you as much on a journey through the soul as it does to any foreign clime. Brooks guides readers through an Australian girlhood; a father's mysterious past; the cataclysmic events of the 1960s, as seen through the eyes of teenagers of different nationalities; and a final voyage of self-discovery in which the adult Geraldine comes face to face with the correspondents of her youth, discovering that the reality of their lives is far more profound than any fiction.


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