Around the heart in eleven years

In this frank, self-confessional travel memoir, Estonian bestselling author Epp Petrone goes looking for lost faces and memories and along the way must deal with the baggage she left behind. At twenty-four, the aspiring writer abandons her safe domestic life and high-paying career to follow an eccentric merchant around the world. On the road she finds a mix of exotic men, nomadic philosophers, wandering minstrels, kindred souls, unusual friendships, hard times, and lost children. All of it is captured in her precious journals – journals she leaves behind with an old Spanish sea captain who promises to wait for her. A decade later she decides to go back to retrieve her memories, but in order to get them back, she first has to reckon with her past. The stories here weave into stories, they take readers around the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, across Russia to Central Asia and the Middle East, from asylums to jails, arms factories to aquariums, and open-air markets to apocalyptic battlefields where the secrets of survival are revealed.