Faraway Nearby

A reissue of this inspiring and heartbreaking memoir about family, empathy and the stories we tell about ourselves and othersGifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was given three boxes of ripening apricots, fruit from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to.In this courageous, heartbreaking memoir, Solnit draws from this unexpected inheritance, weaving her own story into fairy tales and the lives of others. Encompassing the Marquis de Sade and Mary Shelley, explorers and monsters, a library of water in Iceland, and the depths of the Grand Canyon, The Faraway Nearby is a meditation on family, empathy, and the art of storytelling from a writer of limitless talent and imagination.

Like Simon Schama, Solnit is a cultural historian in the desert-mystic mode, trailing ideas like swarms of butterflies, Her writerly digressions obey shapely geometry, not random dérive. [The book is] artfully composed to a unifying scheme, which arises from Solnit's commitment to the storytelling craft and its necessary devices... Finely-wrought, intense and eloquent, [A] passionately imperfect, extremely moving, original and humane book... Beautiful, Solnit is an explorer of the most exquisite kind, and a writer of the public road... We follow [her] mind, and what a mind it is, as vast and intriguing as a system of caverns and passageways opening into yet more caverns and passageways... Courageous, Gripping... Solnit deserves to be widely read

Rebecca Solnit is author of, among other books, Call Them By Their True Names, The Mother of All Questions, Men Explain Things to Me, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the NBCC award-winning River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. A contributing editor to Harper's, she writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.