Sara Sharpe - Going Where My Pig is Headed

TRAVEL DIARIES

Sara Sharpe

Rather than prompting a return to short skirts or a fling with a man half her age, Sara Sharpe’s midlife crisis took a more extreme twist. Packing in a lucrative job in London, she sold her house and all her furniture, and spent the next seven years travelling alone around Greece, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, soaking up language, landscape, culture and cuisine as she went.

This book is a collection of her diaries, written some 20 years later upon her return to the Mediterranean. Frothy language frequently lifts scenery and characters off the page, romanticising a part of the world then still largely untouched by mass tourism. Keeping track with her journeys proves a bit tiresome though with her narrative frequently becoming a blur of meals and bus trips, which never fully reveal what drives her on. Still, her spirit should be infectious enough to put a bomb under a few older readers’ backsides at least.