Towers Temples Palaces: Essays from Europe

What if you just walked away from it all?

In 2016, obscure British-Canadian novelist Ryan Frawley quit a steady job and moved with his wife A and their polydactyl cat to Italy.

A six-month trip became a two-year adventure, as they moved from Italy to southern France and back again to Italy. Spurred on by Britain’s exit from the EU, they set out to explore the continent in a time of flux, of mass tourism and mass terrorism, of shifting alliances and shaky economies, of uncertainty and incivility.

But what they found instead was a different way of living. The essays in this collection were written on trains and planes, in battered buses and rented rooms. Together, they represent the story of a man walking away from the life he was supposed to want in search of something better. And finding it in places he never thought to look.