Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks

Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks

Born on Bland Street in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid places where history happens and culture comes from. She enlists pen pals who offer her a window on the hazards of adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. With the aid of their letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests, the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz. Twenty years later - and worlds away from her sheltered girlhood - Brooks is an award-winning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, reporting on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa. But she never forgets her earlier foreign correspondence. Traveling full circle to attend her dying father, Brooks stumbles on the old letters in her parents' basement. She embarks on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends, and to retrieve her own lost memories of the shy Sydney girl who wrote to them. One by one, she finds men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of a mysterious and tragic mental illness. It is only from the distance of foreign lands and against the background of alien lives that Brooks finally sees her homeplace clearly. This intimate, moving, and often humorous memoir of growing up Down Under speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world.

Geraldine Brooks is the author of four books, including March, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, and Year of Wonders, which were all international blockbusters. She has also written the nonfiction titles Nine Pieces of Desire and Foreign Letters, both of which have received critical praise. Caleb's Crossing, her most recent novel, was a finalist for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction and won the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Christianity Today Book Award. She was born and reared in Australia and now lives with her husband, novelist Tony Horwitz, on Martha's Vineyard. This is her debut novel.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385483735
ISBN 10	0385483732
Title	Foreign Correspondence
Author	Geraldine Brooks
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	1999-01-19
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.