Book details

Book description

From Istanbul to New Delhi to Boulder, Colorado, through Venice, Paris, Rome, and points between

As travellers, we are always walking backwards, forever on the verge of stepping into the unknown, never knowing what waits around the next corner.

You could be lost, forget your passport, fall ill. You could be served a bowl of food and not know whether its animal, vegetable, or mineral. Even flushing the toilet can be an adventure.

You are a child again, innocent and hoping for the best, forced to trust strangers. Quite often this works out. Not always.

Walking Backwards is a return to 10 cities and what happened there. Whether inadvertently smuggling cloth into Istanbul, reading poetry in New Delhi to a crowd expecting a world-famous pianist, or wandering endlessly through Mantua searching for a non-existent hotel on a street thats fallen off the map, Mark Frutkin is a master at rediscovering the magic at the heart of all travel. "The form of travel Frutkin describes is no longer the norm in our wired world, so many of his anecdotes are tinged with nostalgia. Walking Backwards is a reminder of the travellers we once were, and, as such, is both sentimental and entertaining." Mark Frutkin is an award-winning fiction author whose most recent novel, Fabrizio's Return , won the Trillium and Sunburst Awards and was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean Region). In 2008 he published a memoir, Erratic North: A Vietnam Draft Resister's Life in the Canadian Bush . He lives in Ottawa.