Foreign Correspondence

In the tradition of Jill Kerr Conway's bestselling autobiography, "The Road from Coorain, " Geraldine Brooks's "Foreign Correspondence" is a memoir of girlhood in the lower middle-class western suburbs of Sydney in the 1960s and '90s and of how her pen-friendships with correspondents from France and the Middle East to New Jersey widened her world and, ultimately, led to a life abroad as a foreign correspondent for newspapers and magazines. As Brooks comes of age, so does Australia, and interwoven with her personal narrative is the story of her country's emergence from a parochial migrant colony to a diverse international country. Candid, bittersweet, and immediately captivating, "Foreign Correspondence" is a story about the ties of family, friends, and place, the conflicts of tradition and change, and the longing for a life elsewhere.