From down under to all over

Just finished “Foreign Correspondence,” a memoir by Geraldine Brooks, an Australian-born novelist and former newspaper reporter.

Brooks, who grew up in what she considered to be a very dull suburb of Sydney, does a lovely job of conveying her yearning to be part of a larger world. To her, Australia feels remote and restrictive, far away from the glamour of Europe and political excitement in the United States. To reach that larger world, she starts corresponding with several pen pals, in the United States, Israel and France. Later in life, after the letters whet her appetite, she goes to graduate school in New York and becomes a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post in the Middle East.

While sorting through some boxes of papers at her parents’ home, she discovers a pile of old letters from her pen pals and decides to track them down. The story of what has become of her pen pals, 20 years later, is compelling and gracefully told. The book comes full circle when Brooks realizes that what she most wants now, after nearly a decade spent in near constant travel, is a life of quiet isolation, which she finds in a small village in rural Virginia.

I’ve read several of her other books and liked all of them, especially “Year of Wonders.” I also recently learned that she has new novel coming out in January, “People of the Book.” It looks like it uses a similar narrative device as Susan Vreeland’s “Girl in Hyacinth Blue,” following a work of art as it passes hands over several centuries. I’m definitely looking forward to reading it.