In her mid-thirties and happily single, Karen Babine hitches up her tiny Scamp camper and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia to explore the place where her French-Acadian ancestors settled in North America some four centuries ago.

As the miles roll by, she wonders: “Why do we carry this need to belong to an established history? What happens when that can’t—or shouldn’t—happen?” The road reveals more questions than answers about her history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about her life choices as a solo woman, and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship to a very close-knit family on one hand and a deep desire for independence on the other.

Capturing the joy, freedom, and powerful pull of the open road, The Allure of Elsewhere is about the stories we’re told, the stories we tell, and the way those stories make us who we are, often in surprising ways. Intimate, curious, and candid, written with wry wit and warmth, this is a courageous and inspiring memoir.

Karen Babine is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life and All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer. Her third book, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2025. She is the founder and editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and her work has been published in Fourth Genre, Georgia Review, Brevity, and North American Review, and elsewhere. She is a UC Foundation Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

Chris Hewitt, who also has written about theater and movies, is the books editor for the Star Tribune, which means he reads lots of books and reads the beginnings of many more. Several years ago, he re-read all of Agatha Christie’s novels (which he originally read as a kid) in chronological order and blogged about them at tumblr.com/chrisandchristie