‘Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road’ with Sara Wheeler
Wed 12 Apr 2023
7:00pm at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, 14-15 John Street, Bath, BA1 2JL
Book + Ticket gives you a free ticket with a copy of the book, all tickets include 15% off any books purchased on the night, a glass of wine, author interview, Q&A and signing.
Other ways to book:
Email books@mrbsemporium.com, call 01225 331155 or pop into the shop at 14-15 John Street, Bath. BA1 2JL.
We’re thrilled to announce a special evening with Britain’s foremost woman travel writer, Sara Wheeler, to discuss her incredible new memoir Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road. Sara is the author of many prizewinning books including Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic, as awell as the most recent Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia. We can’t wait to welcome Sara to the shop as she takes us on a sweeping journey across a lifetime of travel, from pole to pole and everything in between.
About the Book:
Growing up among blue-collar Conservatives in Bristol where ‘we didn’t know anyone who wasn’t like us’, Wheeler knew she needed to get away. In her twenties she began a dramatic escape: Pole to Pole, via Poland. Glowing Still recalls happy days on India’s Puri Express; an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up (hot fishy breath!); and the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl.
Corralling reindeer with the Sami in Arctic Sweden and towing her baby on a sledge, a helpful herdsman advised her to put foil down her bra to facilitate nursing. Launching at Nubility, Wheeler voyages, via small children, to the welcoming port of Invisibility (she leaves Immobility for the next volume). As she writes in the introduction, when she set sail ‘Role models were scarce in the travel-writing game.’ But advancing years usher in unheralded freedoms, and journey’s end finds Wheeler at peace among Zanzibar dhows, contemplating our connection with other lives – the irreplaceable value that travel brings – and paying homage to her heroines, among them Martha Gellhorn, the ineffable war correspondent who furnishes Wheeler’s epigraph: ‘I do not wish to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.’