Dangers, Mysteries and Fantastic Sights: A Guest Post by Douglas Westerbeke
From Gulliver’s Travels to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn we’ve always been captivated by adventure stories. What happens when you take the formula of an epic travel tale and throw in a hint of magic and unforgettable characters? You get A Short Walk Through a Wide World, Douglas Westerbeke’s debut novel. Douglas has written an exclusive essay for our B&N readers on the inspiration for this novel, below.
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A Short Walk Through a Wide World: A Novel
A Short Walk Through a Wide World: A Novel
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Hardcover $28.99
This is a gorgeous travel story, an ode to the world and its changes and a search for home, full of curiosity, compassion and characters that come to life. Fans of Matt Haig’s Midnight Library and V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, we have your next favorite read right here.
This is a gorgeous travel story, an ode to the world and its changes and a search for home, full of curiosity, compassion and characters that come to life. Fans of Matt Haig’s Midnight Library and V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, we have your next favorite read right here.
I had a short story idea in the back of my mind for some time – an old lady suffering from some mild ailment who goes to her doctor for advice. He tells her to travel somewhere warm and dry. It’s the 1800s. That’s what they did back then. But all she hears is the word travel, and so she takes off on a never-ending trip around the world. It was meant to be a comedy, the joke being that the cure is worse than the disease. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had the makings of something much bigger, more than could be contained in the life of a paranoid old lady. So the paranoid old lady became a young headstrong girl. The mild ailment became an incurable, bone-rattling disease that struck whenever she stayed in any one place too long. Now I had an epic journey. The setting was the entire world. And it wasn’t just going to be a casual trip. I was going to booby-trap it with all kinds of dangers, mysteries, and fantastic sights – things only those who walk the earth get to witness.
So that’s the adventure part, but the flip side is a story of a woman living a life without family, without love, in permanent exile. How do you make a meaningful life for yourself in the face of what feels like a lifelong punishment?
As a preface, I became an avowed atheist as a kid. If you can imagine a stubborn seven-year old kid making a vow of atheism because of some completely convoluted thinking, that was me, and I stuck to it well into adulthood. But as I got older, I started to notice that many of my stories were about atheistic characters who didn’t believe or didn’t particularly like or believe in a higher power, but were nevertheless guided by, and often loved by, some larger force. Only then, through my writing, did I realize I wasn’t nearly as atheistic as I thought I was. I’m still not quite sure what I am, but these are the stories that move me most, stories about our relationship with forces bigger than we are. That’s the heart of A Short Walk Through a Wide World right there, Aubry at war with something more infinite and more powerful than she can comprehend. It is, to my mind, the most epic part of an already epic journey.
First and foremost, this is an adventure story, not so far from Indiana Jones and all those death-defying blockbusters I grew up with. It’s also a story about travel, the lure of faraway places as well as an unobtainable longing for home. It’s also a spiritual tale about finding the meaning in a life that is cursed. But I’m hoping, if all else fails, that readers sense the beauty and poetry that closes the story of Aubry’s life. The theory is, if they can feel it in Aubry’s life, then perhaps they can feel it in their own, too.