How strangers’ books helped me through grief on my around-the-world trip

The author of Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime, reflects on books that made a special trip memorable.

Dian Fossey’s book Gorillas in the Mist inspired this writer to change direction.

In July of 2010, I embarked on a solo trip around the world. I’d planned the tour in honour of my mother, who was lost to Alzheimer’s disease and living in a memory care facility, unable to take the journey she spent a lifetime dreaming about.

My backpack held all the essentials I’d need for one year, including three carefully selected paperbacks. By the time I reached my second stop, Bolivia, a leaky bottle of contact lens solution had reduced my travel library to a sludgy pulp.

Fortunately, I soon discovered my fellow wanderers had left behind patchwork libraries of their own – in the form of “take-a-book, leave-a-book” shelves at nearly every hostel and hotel I visited.

Each new stay was like a literary blind date: Would I be wooed by a bestseller or enlightened by a self-help manifesto? Every shelf was a roll of the dice.

I’d worked in daily newspapers prior to my trip and non-fiction had always been my anchor, yet after tango-tinged nights in Buenos Aires, I found myself swept up in magical realism with Isabel Allende and spellbound reading Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver inside a flimsy safari tent in Kruger National Park. I hopscotched from place to place, encountering writers I’d never known before: Colson Whitehead, Arundhati Roy, Aimee Bender. I learned to embrace these bookish breadcrumbs, because isn’t that what travel is about? Entering an unknown narrative and seeing where the story will go?

Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver.

In early December, I settled into Kigali, Rwanda, for an extended stay at a hostel where the lights flickered and the showerhead often tumbled from the wall. Tucked in the corner of the common room was a stuffed wooden bookcase. I browsed idly, my fingers trailing over the spines until they stopped on Gorillas in the Mist. I knew the film but hadn’t realised it began as a book. Curious, I traded my used copy of JM Coetzee’s Disgrace for the Dian Fossey memoir. Back in my room, tucked under a mosquito net that seemed more theatrical than protective, I sank into the sticky quiet of the Kigali night.

Fossey’s words were an invitation to the Virunga Mountains, so rich and vibrant I could practically smell marshy forest floors and hear the low grunts of gorillas.

Until then, seeing Rwanda’s endangered gorillas felt out of reach; the $750 government-regulated permits were well beyond my backpacker budget. But Gorillas in the Mist turned the idea into a non­negotiable. I reconfigured my plans, reorganised my budget and hopped on a bus to a small village near Volcanoes Nat­ional Park.

The morning of the trek, I laced up my boots and set off with guides to follow Fossey’s footsteps up the muddy slopes until we came face to face with some of the last remaining mountain gorillas on earth. Time seemed to stop. It seemed impossible that a book picked up on a whim had led me to this fog-shrouded peak, overcome by ­emotion. And yet? There I was.

Even as I travelled on, the memory of the gorillas lingered, wrapping me in a veil of wonder and peace. But in Egypt, where I’d ­settled in a scruffy hotel by the Red Sea, an email from my father cut through the tranquillity. My mom had been moved into hospice care.

“Don’t come home,” he wrote. “There’s no point.”

Sara Shepard’s Pretty Little Liars.

I sat in my rented room and stared at the message, feeling the open wound of thousands of kilometres between us. Grief snarled in my chest like a trapped wild dog.

That evening on the hotel bookshelf, I reached for the first book in the Pretty Little Liars young adult series by Sara Shepard. The story line was as fluffy as cotton candy, jammed with campy drama, pretty girls and ugly secrets, but the escape it offered felt like a kindness. Over those endless nights, I made my way through the rest of the ­series, slipping into each book as if into a warm sleeping bag.

And when I ultimately decided to fly home to my family, I left a trail of Pretty Little Liars from Sharm El Sheikh to Columbus, Ohio.

In the years since my trip, e-readers have reshaped the travel landscape, turning physical “take-a-book, leave-a-book” shelves into relics of a different age of wandering. Still, when I stumble across one, I’m seized by an almost childlike joy. These shelves are places of untamed, beautiful chance, where each book lands not by design but by the happenstance of another traveller’s generosity, a testament to curiosity passed hand to hand.

In a world increasingly shaped by data and predictive screens, these shelves are a rebellion against algorithms that nudge us toward narratives we already like. They give us back something unfiltered, something human.

If we’re lucky, the story we stumble across may be the story we need – the answer to a question we didn’t realise we were asking.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Maggie Downs is author of Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime (Counterpoint Press, 2020). $39.98