From an astonishing blue jay to a lone humpback whale, from the back roads of her home town to the streets of Jerusalem and the Tower of London, debut author Faye Rapoport DesPres examines a modern life marked by a passion for the natural world, unexpected love, and shocking loss, and her search for a place she can finally call home in this beautifully-crafted memoir-in-essays.
Three weeks before she turned forty, nothing about her life fit the usual mold. She was single, living in a rented house in Boulder, Colorado, fitting dance classes and nature hikes between workdays at a software start-up that would soon cease to exist. While contemplating a sky still hazy from summer wildfires, she decided to take stock of her nomadic life and find the real reasons she never settled down. The choices she made from that moment on lead her to re-trace her steps both in the States and abroad as she attempted to understand her life. But instead of going back, she found herself moving forward to new love, shocking loss, and finally, in a way that she never expected, to a place that she can almost call home.
Readers who love the memoirs and personal essays of such rising contemporary writers as Cheryl Strayed, Joy Castro, and Kim Dana Kupperman, will appreciate Faye’s observational eye, her passion for the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it, and her search for the surprising truths behind the events of our daily lives.
