Questions of Travel: A Novel - Softcover

"Questions of Travel should ensure her place as a serious international novelist of the first rank."--Economist

"Exquisite, haunting....As she traces Laura's and Ravi's lives over four decades, de Kretser's style is poetic, indelible, and often breathtaking in its beauty."--Library Journal (Starred Review)

"Questions of Travel is that gleaming thing that makes everything around it seem dull in comparison. It's one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read."--The Globe and Mail

Praise for Questions of Travel

"This is a novel unlike any other I have read....Questions of Travel is about uprootedness and travel, about tourism and flight from terror, about the trivial and the terrible....It seems to proceed with an uncanny lightness, in glimpses and sudden shifts. De Kretser is a master storyteller and again and again prepares small--and large--shocks that explode tens of pages later, and cannot be given away."--A.S. Byatt, Guardian

"Studded with fine and funny writing, bursts of affecting drama, and disarming images."--New York Times Book Review

"De Kretser's brilliantly observed new novel explores the meaning of travel....She offers deadly darts of observation that puncture clichés and deflate false enthusiasm. In the end she leaves you flat on the ground, possessed of harder truths."--Publisher's Weekly (Boxed Review)

"De Kretser writes movingly of the sudden attachments and partings that mark her characters' peripatetic lives. And her evocations of place are wonderfully precise... Even as she evokes the pleasures of travel, however, de Kretser wants us to think about its underlying meaning and purpose... She raises profound questions-is the connectedness of modern life an improvement over the rootedness of old? Is any attempt to confront a foreign culture fated to end in dubious simplifications?-but like all the best novelists, she leaves the answers up to her readers." -David Evans, The Independent on Sunday

"As surprising as it is ambitious, Questions of Travel is a satisfying journey through the dislocations of contemporary life." -Arminta Wallace, Irish Times

An Australian tour-guide, returning to work in Sydney after a small inheritance allows her to travel the world, crosses paths with a Sri Lankan political exile in this novel that juxtaposes tourism with the lives of locals. 20,000 first printing.