One woman’s cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead.

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 All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life and the editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She is currently an UC Foundation Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee–Chattanooga.

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publish Date: May 20, 2025
Pages: 240
Type: Paperback
Language: English
Dimensions: 8.5 × 5.5 × 0.5 in, 16 oz
EAN/UPC: 9781571311825
BISAC Categories: Literary Collections - Women Authors, Family & Relationships - Family Historic & Genealogy - Genealogy & Heraldry, Travel - Canada, Atlantic Provinces, Biography & Autobiography - Memoirs, Travel - United States - General, Special Interest - Adventure