Description

*The most unusual novel you will read all year, where you create your own story*

‘An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge’ Lauren Elkin, Guardian

Longlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize

You’ve grown roots, you’re gathering moss. You’re desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go.

Turn the page and make your choice.

You may become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet other travellers with their own stories to tell. Freedom awaits but borders are real. And no story is ever new.

‘Sets you free to roam the Earth… an incisive commentary on the cosmopolitan condition’ Tiffany Tsao

‘An electrifying novel about cosmopolitanism and global nomadism that keeps readers on their toes’ Book Riot

Winner of an English PEN Translates Award, and a Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America

Publisher Review

The perfect match of theme and genre...impeccably executed... This book is escapism taken to the next level, while still making serious and significant comments about modern societies... Paramaditha excels at mordant observations about migration, the brutality of Trump's America, the falsehood of the American dream, and the personal dimension of the 'refugee crisis'... [It] made me think about the world, about chance and fate and the choices we make. -- Helen Vassallo * Translating Women * Sets you free to roam the Earth... an incisive commentary on the cosmopolitan condition. -- Tiffany Tsao An ingeniously crafted debut which lets you make your own choices about where you want the story to go. This is an electrifying novel about cosmopolitanism and global nomadism that keeps readers on their toes. -- Rabeea Saleem * Book Riot * With its choose-your-own adventure structure, The Wandering is fiction at its most lifelike, presenting the reader with choices and inevitable misgivings... It is also fiction at its most untethered, where readers can hurl themselves across time zones, selves and situations, free of risk, danger or discrimination. -- Matthew Janney * Guardian * An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge... Questions such as: "Where am I going?"... "Which choice will make my life worthwhile?" feel existential and urgent... Who can travel, and on what conditions, is one of the primary human rights questions of our era, and The Wandering skilfully takes it on. -- Lauren Elkin * Guardian *