A Hard Place to Leave - Stories from a Restless Life

"Restless to leave, eager to return: this memoir in essays captures the unrelenting pull between the past and the present, between traveling the world and staying home. Starting in a dreary Moscow hotel room in 1983, weaving back and forth to rural New England, and ending on a West Texas trail in 2020, Marcia DeSanctis tells stories that span the globe and half a lifetime. ... Over quicksand in France, insomnia in Cambodia, up a volcano in Rwanda, spinning through the eye of a snowstorm in Bismarck, and atop a dumpster in her own backyard, this New York Times bestselling author, award-winning essayist, and journalist for Vogue and Travel + Leisure immerses us in places waiting to be experienced and some that may be more than we're up for"--Publisher marketing.

List of contents

Table of Contents

1. Masha
2. The Precipice
3. Cold War Game Theory
4. The Offer that Refused Me
5. Un Matin de Septembre

Interlude: Halloween

6. To The Man at the Urinal in Prague
7. The Substitute
8. Love’s Labour’s Won
9. The Language of Sculpture, and of Words

Interlude: Cape Town

10. Waiting for the Sun
11. Goodnight Sweetheart
12. One Day, Three Dead Men
13. Green Pastures and the Ghosts of Rwanda
14. Twenty Years and Counting
15. The Romance of Traveling Alone
16. Milk Bread Butter Chocolate
17. Headlights
18. Connie Britton’s Hair
19. The Stories They Tell                    

Interlude: Dog Walk

20. Falling
21. Seven Draughts of Coffee
22. Petra or Bust
23. Into the Cold
24. Winter (With Apologies to Colette)
25. Time or the Sahara Wind
26. Take me With You
27. Signs of Life and Death in Africa
28. He’s Leaving Home
29. Willa Cather in Lavandou
30. Fear and Solace in the Big Bend
31. Brass City
32. The Voyage

Postscript

About the author

Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of two Grand Prize Solas Awards including the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News. She lives in Connecticut.

Summary

“Intrepid and empathetic, gifted
with the dispassionate gaze of a born observer…a  harmonious collage of
worldview and character, a wunderkammer of experiences in a life fully
lived.” —Melissa Febos, The New York Times

Winner of the 2023 Lowell Thomas Award

“DeSanctis encounters spies and love interests, but it’s her
lushly polished writing that makes this book a joy to read.” —The Washington
Post

Vogue's Best Books of 2022
The Washington Post’s Best Travel Books of 2022

Restless
to leave, eager to return: this memoir in essays captures the
unrelenting pull between the past and the present, between traveling the
world and staying home.
Starting in a dreary Moscow hotel room in 1983, weaving back and forth to rural New England, and
ending on a West Texas trail in 2020, Marcia DeSanctis tells stories
that span the globe and half a lifetime. With intimacy and depth, over
quicksand in France, insomnia in Cambodia, up a volcano in Rwanda,
spinning through the eye of a snowstorm in Bismarck, and atop a dumpster
in her own backyard, this New York Times bestselling author, award-winning essayist and journalist for Vogue and Travel + Leisure immerses
us in places waiting to be experienced and some that may be more than
we’re up for. She encounters spies, angels, leopards, shoes, the odd
rattlesnake, a random head of state, and many times over, the ghosts of
her past. Each subsequent voyage leads to revelations about her search
for solitude, a capacity for adventure, and always, a longing for home.

Foreword

Distribution of approximately 150 ARCs to national reviewers, regional booksellers, reviewers, and bloggers

Galleys out for industry reviews to Kirkus, PW, Booklist, Library Journal, Foreword Review

Advertising in industry publications Shelf Awareness, Kirkus

NPR radio campaign

Ingram galley mailing to key libraries

Author Marcia DeSanctis has deep connections in New York media via her long career as a news producer with Barbara Walters, CBS and NBC news and as a writer for major national magazines. She has extensive public speaking experience and is comfortable on radio and TV/video.

Many virtual book
events, "conversations with authors," and in-person events,
Covid-permitting.

Additional text

Praise for A Hard Place to Leave

“These probing, achingly beautiful essays form an indelible portrait of a life. Who is this woman with her many, at times contradictory, facets? She is an adventurer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, her world set spinning by the brilliance of her mind, the tenacity of her love for her family, and the intensity of her longing to be anywhere but here. Through the very act of interrogating her own restlessness, Marcia DeSanctis provides us with a tantalizing window into a rich and singular world.” —Dani Shapiro, New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance

“Marcia DeSanctis’s A Hard Place to Leave is perfumed with lush, luminous language as she sweeps us all across the globe. From Moscow to Cape Town, quiet New England to Sweden, these tender portraits grow on us like a spring garden.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

“Never has a travel memoir put the ordinary and the extraordinary in such tight and revelatory conversation. A Hard Place to Leave brims over with intelligence and human truth. More than just a recounting of a life boldly and peripatetically lived, it’s a reckoning with the passage of time, with one’s own undying urges. I knew myself better by the end of this book, thanks to the fierce honesty and perpetual questing of Marcia DeSanctis.” —Colleen Kinder, editor of Letter to a Stranger

“There is such honesty and feeling on every page of Marcia DeSanctis’s book—her avowal to push past the conventional boundaries of women’s lives, her rediscovery of travel and solitude, her celebration of family, friendship, and homecoming—that I felt delightedly transported and deeply inspired.” —Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of The Bohemians

“To read this masterfully composed memoir is to better understand our beautiful, broken world, our complex tethers to home and family, and our own imperfect selves. DeSanctis is brilliantly attuned to the nuances of these subjects, and she navigates the hairpin turns between the three with breathtaking curiosity, elegance, wisdom, and generosity. The essays in A Hard Place to Leave are equal parts dark and luminous, ferocious and tender, universal and intimate—and the writing is some of the finest I’ve ever read in my whole damn life.” —Lavinia Spalding, author of Writing Away and editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing

“Mountain climbing. Love affairs. Diplomats who may be spies, or love affairs, or both. Marcia DeSanctis’s travel essays are thoughtful, stylish, and loaded with charm. It’s the kind of book that goes great with a glass of wine and a strong dose of wanderlust.” —Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles

Product details

• Authors: Marcia DeSanctis
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: from age 16
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 03.05.2022
• EAN: 9781609522087
• ISBN: 978-1-60952-208-7
• No. of pages: 336
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs, women's; memoir; biography; essays; travel