Published in 2025
263 pages
Karen Babine is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota, 2015), and All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions, 2019). She’s also the founder and editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and in 2027, her edited collection Beyond Truth and Fact: Innovations in the Craft of Creative Nonfiction will be published by Texas Review Press. Karen holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Eastern Washington University and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She’s currently a UC Foundation Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, where she was honored with the UTAA Outstanding Teaching Award in 2023.
What is this book about?
“A truly fascinating and heartwarming travelogue that beautifully points us in bold directions.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders
One woman’s cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead.
In her mid-thirties and happily single, Karen Babine hitches up her tiny Scamp camper and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia to explore the place where her French-Acadian ancestors settled in North America some four centuries ago.
As the miles roll by, she wonders: “Why do we carry this need to belong to an established history? What happens when that can’t—or shouldn’t—happen?” The road reveals more questions than answers about her history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about her life choices as a solo woman, and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship to a very close-knit family on one hand and a deep desire for independence on the other.
Capturing the joy, freedom, and powerful pull of the open road, The Allure of Elsewhere is about the stories we’re told, the stories we tell, and the way those stories make us who we are, often in surprising ways. Intimate, curious, and candid, written with wry wit and warmth, this is a courageous and inspiring memoir.
