Read about the travel memoir Wanderlust in:
The Awl ”Fabulously addictive.”
Forbes “If ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ is a light beer, ‘Wanderlust’ is a vodka martini served straight up with a twist. Cool, precise, elegant prose that packs quite a punch.”
The Huffington Post ”Wanderlust should be mandatory summer reading.”
National Geographic Traveler “Wanderlust celebrates the life-changing possibilities of the world around us and the rigors and riches of embracing them body and soul.”
The National Post ”Eaves’ book reminds why we care about other people’s lives in the first place — especially if that life includes backpacking through the desert for no real reason other than possibility.”
The New York Times Book Review A “heady, headlong chronicle of a decade and a half spent adrift.”
Oprah “…her vivid tales—Cairo to Yemen to Vancouver—make the journey a vicarious pleasure.”
The Paris Review “She did this so we don’t have to.”
TIME “Broads Abroad,” July 4, 2011
World Hum “Interview with Elisabeth Eaves: ‘Wanderlust,” July 1, 2011
More praise for Wanderlust:
“Elisabeth Eaves is fearless! She’s a warrior-writer of love and travel, encountering with equal courage inclement weather and inappropriate, (though fantastic) men. She’s a twenty-first century Colette, a post-modern Madame de Stael.”
—Rachel Shteir, author of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting
“Wanderlust delivers the goods up front—motorcycles and sex and stories of places that smell nothing like your cafeteria—and then pulls off something trickier. Elisabeth Eaves shows here that our attempts to find a different better self through travel can be immensely entertaining, but we are always already moving. Wanderlust brilliantly, carefully maps how active the heart is, even at a standstill.”
—Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker
“Whether the journey is emotional or geographic, Eaves again and again captures the exhilarating moment when the safe place is left behind and the new place is not yet arrived at—that “in between” moment that contains the thrill of the journey.”
—Andrew McCarthy, actor, director, and writer
“Even those of us who have read Elisabeth Eaves before and know what a poised writer she is will marvel at the elegance and embracing reach of Wanderlust. She conveys the nomadic romance of an adventurous soul traversing the vivid world and yet retains the intimacy of a voice confiding its secrets, taking you with her, smuggling you along. Once Wanderlust embarks, there’ll be no place else you’d rather be.”
—James Wolcott, cultural critic, Vanity Fair
“Elisabeth Eaves’ new memoir, Wanderlust (Seal Press), reads like the diary of the intellectual gypsy you met while backpacking through Europe in your twenties: Her facility with languages and her extended stays in Egypt, Pakistan, and Australia made your itinerary sound like a school field trip; she turned the head of every guy in the youth hostel; and she never seemed afraid to court danger (with men, Mother Nature, or mind-altering substances). Eaves, a travel writer, has an eye for detail and the worldly insight of fellow globe-trotter Pico Iyer. But her goal here isn’t just to relay her experiences facing down sexism in the Middle East or rogue waves while sailing from New Zealand to Tonga. In this highly personal yet relatable book, Eaves embarks on an introspective quest to understand her insatiable desire to find new places to visit as well as new men to love. Her boyfriend-shuffling, recounted candidly and without self-judgment, can be as exciting as her continent-hopping. In mapping her adventures and her romances, Eaves wryly reminds us why her condition is referred to as ‘wanderlust’ and not ‘wanderlove,’ and astutely deconstructs the thrill of escape.”
—Corrie Pikul in ELLE, June 2011
“Wanderlust isn’t as much a desire to travel as it is a force of nature that can course through a person’s veins with such blinding power that there is nothing else in life more important. Elisabeth journeys into her self, and around the world, as she heeds the call of the open road—and her heart.”
— Jen Leo, editor, Sand in My Bra series; and co-host of “This Week in Travel”
“Eaves tells a provocative story that explores the question of why we travel, and how the allure of far-flung places can turn into an obsession. Smart, soulful, and startlingly honest, Wanderlust takes the reader on a wild ride from Paris to Pakistan—and many points in between.”
— Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding and Marco Polo Didn’t Go There