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Table of Contents
About The Book
“Imagine The Life of Pi, The Alchemist, and The Midnight Library rolled into one fantastical fable.” —The New York Times Book Review
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A dazzlingly epic debut that charts the incredible, adventurous life of one woman as she journeys the globe trying to outrun a mysterious curse that will destroy her if she stops moving.
Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she starts to bleed to death.
When medical treatment only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realizes that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her lifelong journey on the run from her condition, which won’t allow her to stay anywhere for longer than a few days nor return to a place where she’s already been.
From the scorched dunes of the Calashino Sand Sea to the snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard, to the shelves of an infinite underground library, we follow Aubry as she learns what it takes to survive and ultimately, to truly live. But the longer Aubry wanders and the more desperate she is to share her life with others, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else’s...
Fiercely independent and hopeful, yet full of longing, Aubry Tourvel is an unforgettable character fighting her way through a world of wonders to find a place she can call home. A spellbinding and inspiring story about discovering meaning in a life that seems otherwise impossible, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reminds us that it’s not the destination, but rather the journey—no matter how long it lasts—that makes us who we are.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A dazzlingly epic debut that charts the incredible, adventurous life of one woman as she journeys the globe trying to outrun a mysterious curse that will destroy her if she stops moving.
Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she starts to bleed to death.
When medical treatment only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realizes that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her lifelong journey on the run from her condition, which won’t allow her to stay anywhere for longer than a few days nor return to a place where she’s already been.
From the scorched dunes of the Calashino Sand Sea to the snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard, to the shelves of an infinite underground library, we follow Aubry as she learns what it takes to survive and ultimately, to truly live. But the longer Aubry wanders and the more desperate she is to share her life with others, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else’s...
Fiercely independent and hopeful, yet full of longing, Aubry Tourvel is an unforgettable character fighting her way through a world of wonders to find a place she can call home. A spellbinding and inspiring story about discovering meaning in a life that seems otherwise impossible, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reminds us that it’s not the destination, but rather the journey—no matter how long it lasts—that makes us who we are.
Excerpt
Chapter 1: A Marketplace 1 A Marketplace
The paper is clean and white—she hasn’t drawn her first line—so when the drop of blood falls and makes its little red mark on the page, she freezes. Her pencil hovers in her hand. Her heart, like it always does, gives her chest an extra kick. She drops the pencil. Hand, like a reflex, goes to her nose. She feels the wetness creeping through her sinuses, tastes the brine in the back of her throat. It’s a trickle now, no more than a nosebleed, but in moments it will be much worse—and here, of all places, just as she’d sat down.
It’s too soon. It’s bad luck. She’d hoped to sleep in a real bed tonight, not hammocks or hard ground, and in the morning have a bath, a proper bath in warm water, with soap. She’d hoped to add more entries to her book, like tinder or flint or paper—but how to draw a piece of paper on a piece of paper so that others will look at it and say, “Oh, I see. A piece of paper.”
She’d hoped to try the food. Look at this market—taro preserves, steamed crab claws, curried prawns wrapped in sheets of bean curd. No, this will have to wait, too, for another time and another market. The list of things she won’t do is even longer than that—what list isn’t?—but there’s no time to dwell. The bath can wait. She’ll find a bed somewhere else. The list is gone. Now is the time to get the hell out.
But the marketplace is alive, the people friendly, and the river right there, a shiny tearstain through the green, clogged with colorful skiffs and fishing boats that can whisk her away, no effort at all. This is Siam, a watery part of the world, all jungle, seasons measured by rainfall. She knew as soon as she set foot here that rivers would be her mode of escape.
That old man, selling fish—such a kindly face, weather-beaten, but a glint in his eye still. He will help. Quickly, she slings her bag over her shoulder and cradles her book in the crook of her arm. She picks up her walking stick, as tall as she is, and moves through blue hairs of incense smoke and burning charcoal. She moves past fishmongers and cloth merchants and tables made of bamboo. The old man smokes a long, thin opium pipe, surrounded by racks of dried fish, dried squid, and dried octopus—anything that was once wet now hangs dry, the old man perched among the racks like a caged bird. She doesn’t know the local language, but the French have colonies to the north and the British have influence to the south.
“Please,” she asks in her accented English, “a boat? Do you know where I might find a boat? I need a boat.”
The old man doesn’t understand. He hadn’t noticed her before, just looks up and there she is, the tallest person in the market, with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, looming over him. The walking stick in her hand, long and straight, makes her look regal, like a venerable Buddhist nun or an emperor’s daughter. Nothing about her suggests the West—no corsets, no bows, no high lace collars, only local fabrics and a laborer’s straw hat—but she will never blend in here, not in this market, not in this country, where she’s at least a head taller than everyone else.
She sees the baffled expression on the old man’s face. She smiles so that he might lower his guard. She rarely blends in anywhere. It’s more rare that she tries. Her appearance invites curious looks and lots of questions. It’s the best method she has of meeting people, but it’s not working on this old man.
He begins chattering in a language she can’t understand. There’s a shift in his demeanor. It happens all the time. He’s mistaken her for a rich foreigner instead of a poor one, instead of someone who has slept in the tops of the jungle canopy and bathed in hidden rivers for the past three weeks. He tries to sell her a stick of dried pomfret. The way he’s gesticulating he might be trying to sell her his whole stand. She raises a single alarmed eyebrow. She’s wrong about this man. Her instinct has failed her. It rarely happens, but when it does it’s downright unnerving. It’s her instinct, her ability to size up a stranger with a glance or two, that’s kept her alive until now.
And then the pain strikes—a terrible, venomous pain—a weeping pain, like an ice pick through a rotten tooth. It drives straight down her spine, from the base of her skull to the small of her back. She shudders as if electrified, then stiffens up, crushing all the slack out of her body. The old man stops his chattering, watches her face turn cold and pale, watches her lips form soundless words. He’s afraid she might topple over in front of him. But she doesn’t topple. She doesn’t even cry out. She clenches her jaw, her body, and shuffles toward the next stall, a jagged limp in her step.
“A boat!” she calls out to anyone. Many turn to hear. None understand. “A boat, a boat, a boat…” She chants the words as she limps past vendors and their stands, as if tossing lifelines from a sinking ship to those onshore. Another stab of pain and the first sparks of panic fly through her brain.
She approaches a woman by a firepit, stirring a yellow curry in an iron wok. She opens her book to the page newly decorated with a drop of blood. Not easy, with all her muscles twitching.
The pages are full of little drawings, hundreds of them, a collection of useful things—bananas, beds, parasols, horses and carriages, needles and thread, locomotives, clockfaces, and candlesticks. She flips through pages with rattled hands until, finally, she finds the little pencil sketch of a boat, of several different kinds of boats—sailboats, steamboats, luxury liners, and canoes, so there can be no mistake.
“A boat? Bateau?”
No response from the woman. Do they know Cantonese here? China is not so far. She’d been in China only a month ago, or so it seemed, cutting through the jungle with a worn-down machete. Now she’s here, south, begging for her life on a riverbank.
“Syún?”
Still the woman doesn’t respond, only stares. Does she know the local word? She’d picked up a few. She’d thought that much ahead. Touk? Was that it?
“Touk?”
But instead of answering her, instead of engaging in some kind of pantomimed conversation as people usually do, the woman drops her big wooden spoon into the curry and silently backs away.
And now she knows she must look very bad. She looks at the handkerchief in her hand. It’s entirely red. The noises of the market have, bit by bit, gone mute, as if she’s underwater, which could only mean that she’s bleeding from the ears, too, and, of course, her mouth is full of blood. She can taste it. She licks her teeth and it pools over her lips and then, to her shame, she knows it’s been dripping down her chin the whole time. She must be a terror to behold.
The pain advances; her entire head is an exposed nerve, a jagged blade scraping the inside of her skull. A terrible pressure builds up against her eyeballs and the ice pick that skewers down the small of her back drives straight into her left leg. She stifles a scream. When she walks, her leg drags behind her like a dead animal.
She wipes her face with her sleeve. It only smears blood across her cheeks. She scans the market for fishermen, ferrymen, anyone who might take her away. She holds out the picture of the boat for all to see.
“Boat! Bateau! Syún!”
No one comes to her aid, but they do stare, fascinated and afraid. She looks rabid, crazed. She looks like someone who can’t be saved. Why would a diseased woman want a boat? To die in? A floating coffin in which to lay her dead body? Would they ever get their boat back? And she can’t explain because this is one language too many. She’s learned plenty by now—Arabic, Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese, even more, even a little Circassian, for God’s sake—but she can’t learn them all.
Then she hears—yes, it is—English behind her, somewhere in the crowd, a small clear voice.
“Mama, that lady needs help!”
She turns and sees the child, a little golden-haired girl above the crowd, above a sea of black hair and conical hats, as if suspended there in her white sunny blouse and pinafore dress—but no, actually sitting on someone’s shoulders, near enough to see, but too far to help. British? American? They will understand her. She holds out her red-stained hand, as if to wave, but in another moment the girl is swallowed up in the marketplace.
A new pain, a vulture in her womb digging itself out. She doubles over and falls to her knees. In one terrible cough, she sprays so much blood on the ground that the crowds swarming around her gasp in unison and back away.
Her hat falls off and her walking stick clatters to the ground. She tries to control her breathing—carefully, because even the smallest breath tempts the gag in her throat. She picks up her walking stick, hugging it close to her chest. She leaves the hat. The hat is not important. She can get a new hat. She climbs to her feet, wipes her mouth, approaches the men in the boats by the shore, unloading fish, selling melons and plantains. They see her coming, see the blood, the stagger. They’d flee but they’re trapped against a logjam of boats.
“Je dois avoir un bateau, s’il vous plait…” she says.
Some of the fishermen point. Some shoo her away. It’s not like anything they’ve seen before, this sickness. She stumbles along the shore and the crowd parts before her.
“Someone… please…”
She trembles, her own little earthquake. People scramble up the riverbank to get out of her way. Some choose to flee into the river, up to their knees in mud, up to their thighs in water. Now there are no more people in front of her and she’s standing on a dock that extends past the boats and into the river.
A ferryboat full of people has just cast off, chugging upstream, clouds of thick black smoke from its funnel. Over the noise of the engine is that same voice, the shout of a little girl.
“Come here! This way!”
She looks and sees two blond-haired children in white—in white of all things, a perfect lambswool white—waving to her from the stern of the boat.
“Here!” they shout. “We’ll help you!”
She tucks the book into her sash, wobbles, and almost falls over again, but she focuses and fights her pain and untaps the last of her strength. She runs the length of the dock, clutching her walking stick in her hands. She runs and when she reaches the end, she doesn’t stop or slow down, but leaps into the muddy river. She leaps and swims with all the power she has left to catch that ferry with the powerful steam engine. And everyone in the marketplace rushes to the shore to watch.
The crowd holds their breath and the children egg her on. She swims and swims and she manages to catch up to that ferry before it can find its speed, all the while her walking stick in one hand, her bag dragging behind her. The people on the ferry, amazed by this feat, reach down and lift her up by the arms and pull her into their boat.
Then she is sprawled on the deck, sopping wet, in a puddle of river water and diluted blood. She clutches her walking stick tight to her body, the way monks clutch their prayer beads. She looks up at her rescuers, her fellow travelers. Panting, she asks them, “Oh, mon dieu… Are we moving? Are we underway?”
The two children, a boy and a girl, stare down at her, and their father, too, a big vault of a man with a New Zealand accent, kneeling beside her. He says, “Yes, yes. We’re moving.”
Relief. Reprieve. No more blood, not from her nose, her lips, or her ears. The pain has already faded away. She can breathe again.
“Dieu merci,” she tells them and smiles. “I am aweigh.”
The paper is clean and white—she hasn’t drawn her first line—so when the drop of blood falls and makes its little red mark on the page, she freezes. Her pencil hovers in her hand. Her heart, like it always does, gives her chest an extra kick. She drops the pencil. Hand, like a reflex, goes to her nose. She feels the wetness creeping through her sinuses, tastes the brine in the back of her throat. It’s a trickle now, no more than a nosebleed, but in moments it will be much worse—and here, of all places, just as she’d sat down.
It’s too soon. It’s bad luck. She’d hoped to sleep in a real bed tonight, not hammocks or hard ground, and in the morning have a bath, a proper bath in warm water, with soap. She’d hoped to add more entries to her book, like tinder or flint or paper—but how to draw a piece of paper on a piece of paper so that others will look at it and say, “Oh, I see. A piece of paper.”
She’d hoped to try the food. Look at this market—taro preserves, steamed crab claws, curried prawns wrapped in sheets of bean curd. No, this will have to wait, too, for another time and another market. The list of things she won’t do is even longer than that—what list isn’t?—but there’s no time to dwell. The bath can wait. She’ll find a bed somewhere else. The list is gone. Now is the time to get the hell out.
But the marketplace is alive, the people friendly, and the river right there, a shiny tearstain through the green, clogged with colorful skiffs and fishing boats that can whisk her away, no effort at all. This is Siam, a watery part of the world, all jungle, seasons measured by rainfall. She knew as soon as she set foot here that rivers would be her mode of escape.
That old man, selling fish—such a kindly face, weather-beaten, but a glint in his eye still. He will help. Quickly, she slings her bag over her shoulder and cradles her book in the crook of her arm. She picks up her walking stick, as tall as she is, and moves through blue hairs of incense smoke and burning charcoal. She moves past fishmongers and cloth merchants and tables made of bamboo. The old man smokes a long, thin opium pipe, surrounded by racks of dried fish, dried squid, and dried octopus—anything that was once wet now hangs dry, the old man perched among the racks like a caged bird. She doesn’t know the local language, but the French have colonies to the north and the British have influence to the south.
“Please,” she asks in her accented English, “a boat? Do you know where I might find a boat? I need a boat.”
The old man doesn’t understand. He hadn’t noticed her before, just looks up and there she is, the tallest person in the market, with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, looming over him. The walking stick in her hand, long and straight, makes her look regal, like a venerable Buddhist nun or an emperor’s daughter. Nothing about her suggests the West—no corsets, no bows, no high lace collars, only local fabrics and a laborer’s straw hat—but she will never blend in here, not in this market, not in this country, where she’s at least a head taller than everyone else.
She sees the baffled expression on the old man’s face. She smiles so that he might lower his guard. She rarely blends in anywhere. It’s more rare that she tries. Her appearance invites curious looks and lots of questions. It’s the best method she has of meeting people, but it’s not working on this old man.
He begins chattering in a language she can’t understand. There’s a shift in his demeanor. It happens all the time. He’s mistaken her for a rich foreigner instead of a poor one, instead of someone who has slept in the tops of the jungle canopy and bathed in hidden rivers for the past three weeks. He tries to sell her a stick of dried pomfret. The way he’s gesticulating he might be trying to sell her his whole stand. She raises a single alarmed eyebrow. She’s wrong about this man. Her instinct has failed her. It rarely happens, but when it does it’s downright unnerving. It’s her instinct, her ability to size up a stranger with a glance or two, that’s kept her alive until now.
And then the pain strikes—a terrible, venomous pain—a weeping pain, like an ice pick through a rotten tooth. It drives straight down her spine, from the base of her skull to the small of her back. She shudders as if electrified, then stiffens up, crushing all the slack out of her body. The old man stops his chattering, watches her face turn cold and pale, watches her lips form soundless words. He’s afraid she might topple over in front of him. But she doesn’t topple. She doesn’t even cry out. She clenches her jaw, her body, and shuffles toward the next stall, a jagged limp in her step.
“A boat!” she calls out to anyone. Many turn to hear. None understand. “A boat, a boat, a boat…” She chants the words as she limps past vendors and their stands, as if tossing lifelines from a sinking ship to those onshore. Another stab of pain and the first sparks of panic fly through her brain.
She approaches a woman by a firepit, stirring a yellow curry in an iron wok. She opens her book to the page newly decorated with a drop of blood. Not easy, with all her muscles twitching.
The pages are full of little drawings, hundreds of them, a collection of useful things—bananas, beds, parasols, horses and carriages, needles and thread, locomotives, clockfaces, and candlesticks. She flips through pages with rattled hands until, finally, she finds the little pencil sketch of a boat, of several different kinds of boats—sailboats, steamboats, luxury liners, and canoes, so there can be no mistake.
“A boat? Bateau?”
No response from the woman. Do they know Cantonese here? China is not so far. She’d been in China only a month ago, or so it seemed, cutting through the jungle with a worn-down machete. Now she’s here, south, begging for her life on a riverbank.
“Syún?”
Still the woman doesn’t respond, only stares. Does she know the local word? She’d picked up a few. She’d thought that much ahead. Touk? Was that it?
“Touk?”
But instead of answering her, instead of engaging in some kind of pantomimed conversation as people usually do, the woman drops her big wooden spoon into the curry and silently backs away.
And now she knows she must look very bad. She looks at the handkerchief in her hand. It’s entirely red. The noises of the market have, bit by bit, gone mute, as if she’s underwater, which could only mean that she’s bleeding from the ears, too, and, of course, her mouth is full of blood. She can taste it. She licks her teeth and it pools over her lips and then, to her shame, she knows it’s been dripping down her chin the whole time. She must be a terror to behold.
The pain advances; her entire head is an exposed nerve, a jagged blade scraping the inside of her skull. A terrible pressure builds up against her eyeballs and the ice pick that skewers down the small of her back drives straight into her left leg. She stifles a scream. When she walks, her leg drags behind her like a dead animal.
She wipes her face with her sleeve. It only smears blood across her cheeks. She scans the market for fishermen, ferrymen, anyone who might take her away. She holds out the picture of the boat for all to see.
“Boat! Bateau! Syún!”
No one comes to her aid, but they do stare, fascinated and afraid. She looks rabid, crazed. She looks like someone who can’t be saved. Why would a diseased woman want a boat? To die in? A floating coffin in which to lay her dead body? Would they ever get their boat back? And she can’t explain because this is one language too many. She’s learned plenty by now—Arabic, Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese, even more, even a little Circassian, for God’s sake—but she can’t learn them all.
Then she hears—yes, it is—English behind her, somewhere in the crowd, a small clear voice.
“Mama, that lady needs help!”
She turns and sees the child, a little golden-haired girl above the crowd, above a sea of black hair and conical hats, as if suspended there in her white sunny blouse and pinafore dress—but no, actually sitting on someone’s shoulders, near enough to see, but too far to help. British? American? They will understand her. She holds out her red-stained hand, as if to wave, but in another moment the girl is swallowed up in the marketplace.
A new pain, a vulture in her womb digging itself out. She doubles over and falls to her knees. In one terrible cough, she sprays so much blood on the ground that the crowds swarming around her gasp in unison and back away.
Her hat falls off and her walking stick clatters to the ground. She tries to control her breathing—carefully, because even the smallest breath tempts the gag in her throat. She picks up her walking stick, hugging it close to her chest. She leaves the hat. The hat is not important. She can get a new hat. She climbs to her feet, wipes her mouth, approaches the men in the boats by the shore, unloading fish, selling melons and plantains. They see her coming, see the blood, the stagger. They’d flee but they’re trapped against a logjam of boats.
“Je dois avoir un bateau, s’il vous plait…” she says.
Some of the fishermen point. Some shoo her away. It’s not like anything they’ve seen before, this sickness. She stumbles along the shore and the crowd parts before her.
“Someone… please…”
She trembles, her own little earthquake. People scramble up the riverbank to get out of her way. Some choose to flee into the river, up to their knees in mud, up to their thighs in water. Now there are no more people in front of her and she’s standing on a dock that extends past the boats and into the river.
A ferryboat full of people has just cast off, chugging upstream, clouds of thick black smoke from its funnel. Over the noise of the engine is that same voice, the shout of a little girl.
“Come here! This way!”
She looks and sees two blond-haired children in white—in white of all things, a perfect lambswool white—waving to her from the stern of the boat.
“Here!” they shout. “We’ll help you!”
She tucks the book into her sash, wobbles, and almost falls over again, but she focuses and fights her pain and untaps the last of her strength. She runs the length of the dock, clutching her walking stick in her hands. She runs and when she reaches the end, she doesn’t stop or slow down, but leaps into the muddy river. She leaps and swims with all the power she has left to catch that ferry with the powerful steam engine. And everyone in the marketplace rushes to the shore to watch.
The crowd holds their breath and the children egg her on. She swims and swims and she manages to catch up to that ferry before it can find its speed, all the while her walking stick in one hand, her bag dragging behind her. The people on the ferry, amazed by this feat, reach down and lift her up by the arms and pull her into their boat.
Then she is sprawled on the deck, sopping wet, in a puddle of river water and diluted blood. She clutches her walking stick tight to her body, the way monks clutch their prayer beads. She looks up at her rescuers, her fellow travelers. Panting, she asks them, “Oh, mon dieu… Are we moving? Are we underway?”
The two children, a boy and a girl, stare down at her, and their father, too, a big vault of a man with a New Zealand accent, kneeling beside her. He says, “Yes, yes. We’re moving.”
Relief. Reprieve. No more blood, not from her nose, her lips, or her ears. The pain has already faded away. She can breathe again.
“Dieu merci,” she tells them and smiles. “I am aweigh.”
Reading Group Guide
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This reading group guide for A Short Walk Through a Wide World includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Douglas Westerbeke. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
“There are things on this earth that only exist because you have beheld them. If you weren’t there, they would never have been.” Aubry Tourvel has speared a humpback whale off the coast of New Guinea, enjoyed the hospitality of a Bulgarian farmhand and Indian royalty, succumbed to the swampy depths of the Congo jungle, and crossed the Himalayas alone. Her adventures are not ones of choice, but of necessity—if she ever stops moving, she will die. Beset by a violent and unexplained illness when she is a young girl, Aubry flees from her loving Parisian home and discovers that movement is what keeps her alive, launching a miraculous and epic crisscrossing of the globe. Outracing her disease by way of a perpetually nomadic existence, she vanquishes beasts, falls in love, and unearths wonders beyond her wildest imaginings, all the while grappling with a fundamental question: Is her sickness a gift or a curse? In A Short Walk Through a Wide World, Douglas Westerbeke invites readers along Aubry’s extraordinary journey to create meaning through the essential connections that make a home out of life.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. Brainstorm some adjectives you would use to describe Aubry. What traits make her especially able to survive? Compare her to other characters in the book, like Marta, the Prince, Qalima, and Lionel. Is there a character who resonates strongly with you?
2. The natural world is a core piece of A Short Walk Through a Wide World. What were some of your favorite descriptive lines evoking the landscapes Aubry traverses? How would the feel of the novel change if a majority of the plot took place on the streets of major cities?
3. From the spider on the boathouse “reaching out into its little universe” (page 70) to Pathik’s eagle, animals animate Aubry’s travels. Can you point to any instances where an animal might be a metaphor for something Aubry confronts, or even for Aubry herself?
Think back to the many slivers of Aubry’s life Westerbeke offers—like lying on a beach with Yuki (page 142), dancing with the Navajo (page 246), or paddling by the crabs on Christmas Island (page 260). Out of these small departures, which one would you have liked to learn more about?
In the first “Brief Aside,” Aubry meets an old Chilean man who dislikes travel—a welcome change from the usual reaction to her illness (page 74). What do you think of the man’s argument? What are your own personal opinions about travel?
Can you think of certain passages where Aubry’s gender seemed especially salient? What plot points might change if Westerbeke decided to write A Short Walk Through a Wide World with a male protagonist?
How does the nonlinear structure of A Short Walk Through a Wide World affect your reading? What would happen to your experience of the book if Westerbeke decided to write the story of Aubry’s life purely chronologically?
On the riverboat with the Holcombes, Aubry tells Somerset that she has replaced the shaft and point of her spear several times. “Is it the same spear?” she asks him. “It looks the same. But I don’t know. Is it the same spear? You tell me” (page 58). How does this moment relate to the “core of consciousness” motif to which Aubry returns (page 195)?
9. In your opinion, which character most significantly impacts Aubry? This can be in an emotional, narrative, or philosophical context.
10. Aubry’s sickness rips her from her parents and sisters as a nine-year-old girl and forces her to spend decades with no lasting relationships. The last page of the novel suggests that Aubry has finally found a home with Vincente and his band of lost children. What is the role of childhood and family in A Short Walk Through a Wide World? How do these concepts motivate Aubry?
How does Aubry’s approach to life evolve over the course of the novel? What do her illness and the puzzle ball ultimately represent?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. As a group, come up with a list of other “armchair travel” novels that you have read, and discuss how these selections differ from or are similar to A Short Walk Through a Wide World. What is gained from Westerbeke’s approach? What about any films or other media that explore similar themes of adventure, self-determination, and the meaning of life?
2. Pick a character Aubry meets in the novel and write a paragraph or two from their perspective. What do they think of Aubry initially, and what do they share with her? When she leaves, what feelings does she leave them with?
3. Be like Marta and map out all of Aubry’s travels. Have you been to any of the places Aubry has? Out of all her destinations, which are on your dream bucket list?
4. Cast the A Short Walk Through a Wide World movie or miniseries: Choose your top picks for the main roles, and make a case to the larger group about who would best embody each character.
A Conversation with Douglas Westerbeke
How did you come up with the general concept of A Short Walk Through a Wide World? Did you have a method for keeping track of all the different plotlines?
A Short Walk Through a Wide World actually began as a short story I was thinking of one day, about an old lady who goes to her doctor for some mild ailment. Her doctor tells her to travel somewhere warm and dry (this is the 1880s when that’s what people did) but all she hears is travel. So she ends up wandering the world trying to evade whatever it is she’s afraid of, getting into more trouble than it’s worth. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had the makings of a much bigger adventure, so the old lady became young, was struck with a really God-awful sickness, and I went about creating a lifetime of adventures for her.
The story was a broken narrative right from the start. I knew I wouldn’t be able to fit in all the ideas I wanted to with a linear narrative. I knew I wanted to begin in that marketplace with a near-death scene. From there it was easy to imagine it as a story she was telling to others along the way. Even my preliminary one-page outline, which is how I always start a story, jumped around everywhere. If fact, it was even crazier, with stories within stories within stories so you lost track of who she was talking to in the first place, which was fun to write, but I had to simplify it to make it easier to follow. I like how it is now. Aubry goes somewhere, meets someone, which is a story in its own, while telling them a story of her past. Not a typical narrative, but it has an elegance to it.
Which of the characters in A Short Walk Through a Wide World did you find easiest to write? If you could return to any of the minor characters in the form of a short story or novella, who would you want to explore?
The hardest characters were the side characters, the people Aubry meets during her lifelong journey, because I had less time to flesh them out. With Uzair I had to convey a sense of haughtiness and loneliness in a short time, as well as tell the story of an illicit love affair. With the Prince, I needed a thoughtful, serene character who could convey some of the more spiritual ideas in the book. Not easy to do when they only appear for one-fifth of the story.
So the easiest character to write was Aubry, and it was a lot of fun, because I got to watch her grow up and grow old, and it seemed to me a very natural progression—from a tyrannical little kid, to a sullen teen, to a fun-loving woman making friends everywhere she goes, to a bit of a hermit in her old age. She has a lot of different personas during the course of the book, like we all do, and really, all I had to do was remember what I was like as a kid, as a teen, what my mom was like, what my grandmother was like.
If I were to do a spin-off of one of the minor characters? I might choose Vicente and write up a prequel, because he had a pretty epic journey as well, and he’s a bit of a curmudgeon, and I have a soft spot for curmudgeonly characters. But Marta is also particularly suited for an adventurous story of her own. I might even choose the Holcombes because nobody would be expecting that, but an adventure story for a family of four I could totally relate to.
As you were developing and writing A Short Walk Through a Wide World, did you reach for any books or other media for inspiration?
So this the part where I’m afraid I’m going to sound a bit pretentious. I read lots of stuff while writing A Short Walk Through a Wide World, books on travel, books about other cultures, but the two works that had the most influence on the story were Dante’s Paradisio and The Bhagavad Gita. Both books are epic journeys of very different kinds. Dante has an epic journey through the celestial spheres, the most fantastic place ever. Arjuna goes deep, deep inside himself with Krishna’s help. Both Dante and Arjuna encounter the divine in its purest form. These moments had such an impact on me that, in one way or another, they wove themselves into Aubry’s journey as well. They ultimately shaped the book.
How did you work as a librarian influence your writing?
I would never have written A Short Walk Through a Wide World if I hadn’t worked at the Cleveland Public Library. First of all, you’re surrounded by books. I mean, if you’re the curious type, and you get books of all kinds landing on your desk all day, you spend the day itching to read a few of them at least! Plus, you’re surrounded by readers who are recommending stuff to you, and then, best of all, my boss in the Literature Department, Amy Dawson, one day encouraged me to join the Dublin Literary Committee. The International Dublin Literary Award is a literature prize chosen, in large part, by librarians around the world. A group of us at the Cleveland Public Library would get together and read as many books as we could, choose our favorites (a lot of debating and defending your picks there), and send the list to Dublin. I was reading fifty to a hundred books every year for Dublin alone, never mind all the other stuff I was reading. It was a huge education. You learn to be very critical, learn what you like, what you don’t, different ways to plot a story, to present a character or a theme, all that good stuff. I never thought I had the ability to write a novel before, but Dublin changed that, broke down the process and made it seem possible.
What is your own relationship to travel?
When I was a kid, I would sail up and down the New England coast with my family on a boat my dad built. We did the Marion to Bermuda Race a few times. I traveled to Minsk for my brother’s wedding, to Beijing and Macau to meet my in-laws. When I left home for college, I picked schools as far away as I could because I wanted to see places. I love travel. That’s not hard to say. Most people do. But I love to hang out in airports and walk past all the gates, flights going to Dubai and Delhi and Santiago, and fantasize about sneaking onboard and taking off to some random place.
At the same time, you can burn out. I spent three or four weeks traveling up and down China. By the time me and my kids got to Beijing, we were exhausted and just slept for days. No Great Wall, no Forbidden City. It’s the only time that’s ever happened to me, but we’d had enough. My dad used to travel all the time for his work. Today, he hates travel. My wife is the same way. So imagine you have no choice, that you can never stop. It’s got to be hell on earth after a while. There’s the romantic and adrenaline-fueled aspect of travel that lasts a short while, then there’s the reality of a nomadic existence with nowhere to call home. A Short Walk Through a Wide World has a foot in each place.
To your mind, what is the role of spirituality in this book?
I became an avowed atheist as a kid. I’m talking six or seven years old, completely through convoluted thinking, but hey, I was a kid, and a stubborn one, and I stuck to it. As I got older, I started to notice that many of my stories were about atheistic characters, who either didn’t believe or didn’t particularly like God, but were beloved by Him anyway. Only then, through my writing, did I realize I wasn’t nearly as atheistic as I thought I was. I’m still not quite sure what I am, but these are the stories that move me most, stories about our relationship with forces bigger than we are. That’s the heart of A Short Walk Through a Wide World right there: Aubry at war with something bigger and more powerful than she can even comprehend. It is, to my mind, the most epic part of a pretty epic journey.
What do you hope readers will take away from the novel?
There are the obvious things I hope people like about my novel. It’s an epic adventure, first and foremost, so I hope people find it exciting. It’s also a story of a woman trying to find meaning in a life that feels cursed, so I’m hoping people find some worthwhile lessons there.
When I first finished a long, detailed outline of A Short Walk Through a Wide World, I read it out loud to my wife over the course of a few nights. It was about a hundred pages or so, with all the dialog written out. My wife is a musician, by the way, plays violin for the Cleveland Orchestra, so when I got to the ending and finally finished the book, she said, “That was like music.” I’ll remember that as a high-water mark for me, the best response I’ve ever gotten from a story of mine. I’m hoping, if all else fails, that readers sense the beauty and poetry that closes the story of Aubry’s life. The theory is, if they can feel it in Aubry’s life, then perhaps they can feel it in their own, too.
Introduction
“There are things on this earth that only exist because you have beheld them. If you weren’t there, they would never have been.” Aubry Tourvel has speared a humpback whale off the coast of New Guinea, enjoyed the hospitality of a Bulgarian farmhand and Indian royalty, succumbed to the swampy depths of the Congo jungle, and crossed the Himalayas alone. Her adventures are not ones of choice, but of necessity—if she ever stops moving, she will die. Beset by a violent and unexplained illness when she is a young girl, Aubry flees from her loving Parisian home and discovers that movement is what keeps her alive, launching a miraculous and epic crisscrossing of the globe. Outracing her disease by way of a perpetually nomadic existence, she vanquishes beasts, falls in love, and unearths wonders beyond her wildest imaginings, all the while grappling with a fundamental question: Is her sickness a gift or a curse? In A Short Walk Through a Wide World, Douglas Westerbeke invites readers along Aubry’s extraordinary journey to create meaning through the essential connections that make a home out of life.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. Brainstorm some adjectives you would use to describe Aubry. What traits make her especially able to survive? Compare her to other characters in the book, like Marta, the Prince, Qalima, and Lionel. Is there a character who resonates strongly with you?
2. The natural world is a core piece of A Short Walk Through a Wide World. What were some of your favorite descriptive lines evoking the landscapes Aubry traverses? How would the feel of the novel change if a majority of the plot took place on the streets of major cities?
3. From the spider on the boathouse “reaching out into its little universe” (page 70) to Pathik’s eagle, animals animate Aubry’s travels. Can you point to any instances where an animal might be a metaphor for something Aubry confronts, or even for Aubry herself?
Think back to the many slivers of Aubry’s life Westerbeke offers—like lying on a beach with Yuki (page 142), dancing with the Navajo (page 246), or paddling by the crabs on Christmas Island (page 260). Out of these small departures, which one would you have liked to learn more about?
In the first “Brief Aside,” Aubry meets an old Chilean man who dislikes travel—a welcome change from the usual reaction to her illness (page 74). What do you think of the man’s argument? What are your own personal opinions about travel?
Can you think of certain passages where Aubry’s gender seemed especially salient? What plot points might change if Westerbeke decided to write A Short Walk Through a Wide World with a male protagonist?
How does the nonlinear structure of A Short Walk Through a Wide World affect your reading? What would happen to your experience of the book if Westerbeke decided to write the story of Aubry’s life purely chronologically?
On the riverboat with the Holcombes, Aubry tells Somerset that she has replaced the shaft and point of her spear several times. “Is it the same spear?” she asks him. “It looks the same. But I don’t know. Is it the same spear? You tell me” (page 58). How does this moment relate to the “core of consciousness” motif to which Aubry returns (page 195)?
9. In your opinion, which character most significantly impacts Aubry? This can be in an emotional, narrative, or philosophical context.
10. Aubry’s sickness rips her from her parents and sisters as a nine-year-old girl and forces her to spend decades with no lasting relationships. The last page of the novel suggests that Aubry has finally found a home with Vincente and his band of lost children. What is the role of childhood and family in A Short Walk Through a Wide World? How do these concepts motivate Aubry?
How does Aubry’s approach to life evolve over the course of the novel? What do her illness and the puzzle ball ultimately represent?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. As a group, come up with a list of other “armchair travel” novels that you have read, and discuss how these selections differ from or are similar to A Short Walk Through a Wide World. What is gained from Westerbeke’s approach? What about any films or other media that explore similar themes of adventure, self-determination, and the meaning of life?
2. Pick a character Aubry meets in the novel and write a paragraph or two from their perspective. What do they think of Aubry initially, and what do they share with her? When she leaves, what feelings does she leave them with?
3. Be like Marta and map out all of Aubry’s travels. Have you been to any of the places Aubry has? Out of all her destinations, which are on your dream bucket list?
4. Cast the A Short Walk Through a Wide World movie or miniseries: Choose your top picks for the main roles, and make a case to the larger group about who would best embody each character.
A Conversation with Douglas Westerbeke
How did you come up with the general concept of A Short Walk Through a Wide World? Did you have a method for keeping track of all the different plotlines?
A Short Walk Through a Wide World actually began as a short story I was thinking of one day, about an old lady who goes to her doctor for some mild ailment. Her doctor tells her to travel somewhere warm and dry (this is the 1880s when that’s what people did) but all she hears is travel. So she ends up wandering the world trying to evade whatever it is she’s afraid of, getting into more trouble than it’s worth. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had the makings of a much bigger adventure, so the old lady became young, was struck with a really God-awful sickness, and I went about creating a lifetime of adventures for her.
The story was a broken narrative right from the start. I knew I wouldn’t be able to fit in all the ideas I wanted to with a linear narrative. I knew I wanted to begin in that marketplace with a near-death scene. From there it was easy to imagine it as a story she was telling to others along the way. Even my preliminary one-page outline, which is how I always start a story, jumped around everywhere. If fact, it was even crazier, with stories within stories within stories so you lost track of who she was talking to in the first place, which was fun to write, but I had to simplify it to make it easier to follow. I like how it is now. Aubry goes somewhere, meets someone, which is a story in its own, while telling them a story of her past. Not a typical narrative, but it has an elegance to it.
Which of the characters in A Short Walk Through a Wide World did you find easiest to write? If you could return to any of the minor characters in the form of a short story or novella, who would you want to explore?
The hardest characters were the side characters, the people Aubry meets during her lifelong journey, because I had less time to flesh them out. With Uzair I had to convey a sense of haughtiness and loneliness in a short time, as well as tell the story of an illicit love affair. With the Prince, I needed a thoughtful, serene character who could convey some of the more spiritual ideas in the book. Not easy to do when they only appear for one-fifth of the story.
So the easiest character to write was Aubry, and it was a lot of fun, because I got to watch her grow up and grow old, and it seemed to me a very natural progression—from a tyrannical little kid, to a sullen teen, to a fun-loving woman making friends everywhere she goes, to a bit of a hermit in her old age. She has a lot of different personas during the course of the book, like we all do, and really, all I had to do was remember what I was like as a kid, as a teen, what my mom was like, what my grandmother was like.
If I were to do a spin-off of one of the minor characters? I might choose Vicente and write up a prequel, because he had a pretty epic journey as well, and he’s a bit of a curmudgeon, and I have a soft spot for curmudgeonly characters. But Marta is also particularly suited for an adventurous story of her own. I might even choose the Holcombes because nobody would be expecting that, but an adventure story for a family of four I could totally relate to.
As you were developing and writing A Short Walk Through a Wide World, did you reach for any books or other media for inspiration?
So this the part where I’m afraid I’m going to sound a bit pretentious. I read lots of stuff while writing A Short Walk Through a Wide World, books on travel, books about other cultures, but the two works that had the most influence on the story were Dante’s Paradisio and The Bhagavad Gita. Both books are epic journeys of very different kinds. Dante has an epic journey through the celestial spheres, the most fantastic place ever. Arjuna goes deep, deep inside himself with Krishna’s help. Both Dante and Arjuna encounter the divine in its purest form. These moments had such an impact on me that, in one way or another, they wove themselves into Aubry’s journey as well. They ultimately shaped the book.
How did you work as a librarian influence your writing?
I would never have written A Short Walk Through a Wide World if I hadn’t worked at the Cleveland Public Library. First of all, you’re surrounded by books. I mean, if you’re the curious type, and you get books of all kinds landing on your desk all day, you spend the day itching to read a few of them at least! Plus, you’re surrounded by readers who are recommending stuff to you, and then, best of all, my boss in the Literature Department, Amy Dawson, one day encouraged me to join the Dublin Literary Committee. The International Dublin Literary Award is a literature prize chosen, in large part, by librarians around the world. A group of us at the Cleveland Public Library would get together and read as many books as we could, choose our favorites (a lot of debating and defending your picks there), and send the list to Dublin. I was reading fifty to a hundred books every year for Dublin alone, never mind all the other stuff I was reading. It was a huge education. You learn to be very critical, learn what you like, what you don’t, different ways to plot a story, to present a character or a theme, all that good stuff. I never thought I had the ability to write a novel before, but Dublin changed that, broke down the process and made it seem possible.
What is your own relationship to travel?
When I was a kid, I would sail up and down the New England coast with my family on a boat my dad built. We did the Marion to Bermuda Race a few times. I traveled to Minsk for my brother’s wedding, to Beijing and Macau to meet my in-laws. When I left home for college, I picked schools as far away as I could because I wanted to see places. I love travel. That’s not hard to say. Most people do. But I love to hang out in airports and walk past all the gates, flights going to Dubai and Delhi and Santiago, and fantasize about sneaking onboard and taking off to some random place.
At the same time, you can burn out. I spent three or four weeks traveling up and down China. By the time me and my kids got to Beijing, we were exhausted and just slept for days. No Great Wall, no Forbidden City. It’s the only time that’s ever happened to me, but we’d had enough. My dad used to travel all the time for his work. Today, he hates travel. My wife is the same way. So imagine you have no choice, that you can never stop. It’s got to be hell on earth after a while. There’s the romantic and adrenaline-fueled aspect of travel that lasts a short while, then there’s the reality of a nomadic existence with nowhere to call home. A Short Walk Through a Wide World has a foot in each place.
To your mind, what is the role of spirituality in this book?
I became an avowed atheist as a kid. I’m talking six or seven years old, completely through convoluted thinking, but hey, I was a kid, and a stubborn one, and I stuck to it. As I got older, I started to notice that many of my stories were about atheistic characters, who either didn’t believe or didn’t particularly like God, but were beloved by Him anyway. Only then, through my writing, did I realize I wasn’t nearly as atheistic as I thought I was. I’m still not quite sure what I am, but these are the stories that move me most, stories about our relationship with forces bigger than we are. That’s the heart of A Short Walk Through a Wide World right there: Aubry at war with something bigger and more powerful than she can even comprehend. It is, to my mind, the most epic part of a pretty epic journey.
What do you hope readers will take away from the novel?
There are the obvious things I hope people like about my novel. It’s an epic adventure, first and foremost, so I hope people find it exciting. It’s also a story of a woman trying to find meaning in a life that feels cursed, so I’m hoping people find some worthwhile lessons there.
When I first finished a long, detailed outline of A Short Walk Through a Wide World, I read it out loud to my wife over the course of a few nights. It was about a hundred pages or so, with all the dialog written out. My wife is a musician, by the way, plays violin for the Cleveland Orchestra, so when I got to the ending and finally finished the book, she said, “That was like music.” I’ll remember that as a high-water mark for me, the best response I’ve ever gotten from a story of mine. I’m hoping, if all else fails, that readers sense the beauty and poetry that closes the story of Aubry’s life. The theory is, if they can feel it in Aubry’s life, then perhaps they can feel it in their own, too.
About The Author
Photograph by Roan Westerbeke
Douglas Westerbeke is a librarian who lives in Ohio and works at one of the largest libraries in the US. He has spent the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, which inspired him to write his own book.
Product Details
- Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (April 2, 2024)
- Length: 400 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668026069
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Raves and Reviews
“This whirlwind fever dream of a novel races around the globe, through markets, deserts, and cities, across oceans, over mountains, into the caverns of a vast underground library, chasing its extraordinary protagonist, Aubry Tourvel. . . Welcome to her long, exciting, dangerous, and romantic life.” —Marion Winik, Oprah Daily
“An epic adventure. . . rich with all the possibilities the world can hold.” —People
"Sharing a shelf with philosophical adventure novels like The Midnight Library and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Westerbeke’s debut thoughtfully explores the effects of being forced to live only in the present." —Washington Post (10 Noteworthy Books for April)
“Part magical realism–laced travelogue, part love letter to the world, Westerbeke’s extraordinary debut spans decades . . . Striking set pieces, stunning character work, and evocative, insightful prose make every page worth savoring. A hopeful tale of improbable friendships, whirlwind romances, and unexpected joy.” —Kirkus Review (*starred* review)
"Librarian Westerbeke combines elements of Vernian adventure and Borgesian fantasy in his enthralling debut about a woman who must travel constantly in order to survive. . . Capturing each moment of Aubry’s sweeping odyssey with extraordinary vividness, Westerbeke’s poignant epic speaks to the challenges of knowing oneself and others in a world of endless change. This is unforgettable.” —Publishers Weekly (*starred* review)
“A one-of-a-kind love letter to nature, humanity, and the stories we all carry within ourselves. Westerbeke’s engrossing, assured debut will enchant fans of Erin Morgenstern and Alix Harrow.” —Booklist (*starred* review)
"Readers of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab and Life of Pi by Yann Martel will fall in love with Aubry. Librarian Westerbeke’s debut is highly recommended for anyone who enjoys armchair travel and stories that open wide to embrace every experience, even the sad ones." —Library Journal (*starred* review)
“A wild romping adventure, a poignant tale of relationships and interconnectedness, and a compelling journey of self-discovery. A Short Walk Through a Wide World is utterly engrossing, a world—worlds—to get lost in. . . every reader will find something to love.” —Shelf Awareness
"Imaginative. . . A fleet-footed winner.” —The Christian Science Monitor
"A shining story. . . with exciting twists and prose that feels like legend, this is an essential read for anyone looking to renew their lust for life. Perfect for fans of Matt Haig and V.E. Schwab." —Barnes & Noble, “Most Anticipated Debut Novels of 2024”
“An incredible, dazzling debut. . . I’ve never read anything like it.” —Thoughts From a Page podcast
"For those who believe the journey is the destination." —Goodreads
“A Short Walk Through a Wide World is a gorgeous ode to wanderlust. When Aubry Tourvel embarks on an eternal trip, trying to outrun a mysterious affliction, she quickly learns to defend herself. But while her spear’s aim is deadly, curiosity and compassion slay harder. Douglas Westerbeke's dazzling debut takes readers on a thought-provoking journey through cultures and timelines… and also, through a mysterious cave-bound library. I savored every page of this book!” —SHELBY VAN PELT, New York Times bestselling author of Remarkably Bright Creatures
“A Short Walk Through a Wide World is the rare book that immediately becomes a dear friend. Westerbeke has written a beautiful ode to wanderlust, the intrepid spirit, and the changing planet. Aubry Tourvel perfectly embodies the twin desires for exploration and rootedness in a way that makes readers long to walk with her. This is a novel that asks what it is to love the world, and what it is for the world to love us. A grand adventure that begs to be revisited again and again.” —ERIKA SWYLER, author of The Book of Speculation and Light From Other Stars
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