The strongest stories of place are often those that tell of a personal pilgrimage: journeys made under compulsion to wonder at nature, to a place of potent memory, a grave or home of a hero, to the site of a disaster or miracle.

In this compelling collection of essays, fifteen internationally acclaimed novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers share the personal journeys they felt impelled to make. Among them, Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood travels to the northern site where the members of the Franklin expedition perished. Roddy Doyle (Ireland) takes us to the 1989 World Cup. Nuruddin Farah, described by the New York Review of Books as “the most important African novelist to emerge in the last twenty-five years,” returns to his native, war-torn Somalia. Orange Prize winner Kate Grenville (Australia) travels to the bush and the house of a convict ancestor. Douglas Coupland takes us on an airplane. Ivan Klíma (Czech Republic), whose books and plays have been translated into 29 languages, visits the concentration camp where he was interned as a boy. Mark Kurlansky (U.S.), bestselling author of Cod and Salt, spends a week in a medieval monastery listening to plainchant. Wendy Law-Yone (Myanmar), author of The Coffin Tree and Irrawaddy Tango, follows the road that brought her Chinese and British ancestors to Burma. The Booker Prize-nominated Michael Collins (Ireland) writes of a foot race high in the Himalayas. And the editor of this collection, Katherine Govier, visits the grave of Miyamoto Musashi, the sixteenth-century Japanese sword master.