By Sara Wheeler Jonathan Cape, £18.99 (ebook £9.49).
ACCLAIMED travel writer Sara Wheeler has produced another evocative book-companion; much in the vein of previous tomes such as Terra Incognita: Travels In Antarctica.
Moving away from the planet’s poles, O My America! is a voyage across time, space and with a sense of adventure and pilgrimage, offering an emotional yet defiant account of six 19th-century British women on paths of reinvention.
Outsiders they may have been – the likes of the Yorkshire-born, home-loving Rebecca Burlend, and the novelist Catherine Hubback, who after leaving her husband in a mental asylum took off on the railways to San Francisco - it seems that Wheeler is offering the fact that the vastness and unknown quantity that was the New World will not and cannot phase them.
One becomes a willing, silent companion to these women, as Wheeler moves back and forth across centuries, to present a most amenable and worthy document.
8/10
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