Orem Library

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary...

"Tell me," poet Mary Oliver once wrote, "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Oliver's quote opens the The Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 10: True Stories from Around the World. And to answer the question, thirty celebrated and emerging writers invite you to ride shotgun as they travel the globe to discover new places, people, and facets of themselves. The essays are as diverse as the destinations, the common thread...

Kathleen joins her husband for a three-month trip to New Zealand when hes hired by a film studio in Wellington. Leaving behind all that is familiar in her comfortable corner in Southern California, she realizes that the past twenty years have been so tightly woven into the life of her only daughter that shes not sure who she is on her own or with her husband. In her isolation, Kathleen begins to contemplate reinventing herself, but...

Best friends Hope and Laurie are both turning 40 this year. What better way to celebrate than on a sandy beach in Waikiki? Their husbands and children urge them to go, but a few months before she boards the plane, Hope discovers she is carrying a little surprise. When she lands in Hawaii, she's packing a maternity bathing suit along with her tour brochures. Will these two sisterchicks still learn to do the hula?

At the age of thirty-five, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne has left her philandering husband in San Francisco to set sail for Belgium, with her three children and nanny in tow, to study art. It is a chance for this adventurous woman to start over, to make a better life for all of them, and to pursue her own desires. Not long after her arrival, however, tragedy strikes, and Fanny and her children repair to a quiet artists' colony in France where she can...

"This 12th volume in the popular series presents the best travel writing by women for women that's been done in the past few years. Adventures range from a trip into a new neighborhood to expeditions to the far corners of the globe, always with the inner journey close at hand to give perspective and meaning. The voices are diverse, intimate, and engaging, as are the stories." --

A portrait of one of the last great female adventurers chronicles the life of Freya Stark, a British woman whose career as a writer and explorer led her into the remote regions of the Islamic world during the first half of the twentieth century.