Wednesday

Walking Backwards

Mark Frutkin, of Ottawa, is pleased to announce the launching of his new book, Walking Backwards, a travel memoir, at Collected Works Bookstore on:
Wednesday, September 21 at 7:30 pm.
Collected Works Bookstore is located at 1242 Wellington Street West (near Holland), in Ottawa.

From Istanbul to New Delhi to Boulder, Colorado, through Venice, Paris, Rome and points between…
As travelers, we are always ‘walking backwards’, forever on the verge of stepping into the unknown, never knowing what waits around the next corner.

You could be lost, forget your passport, fall ill. You could be served a bowl of food and not know whether it’s animal, vegetable or mineral. Even flushing the toilet can be an adventure.

You are a child again, innocent and hoping for the best, forced to trust strangers. Quite often this works out. Not always.

Walking Backwards is Mark Frutkin’s return to ten cities and what happened there. Whether inadvertently smuggling ‘cloth’ into Istanbul, reading poetry in New Delhi to a crowd expecting a world-famous pianist, or wandering endlessly through Mantua searching for a non-existent hotel on a street that has fallen off the map, Frutkin is a master at rediscovering the magic at the heart of all travel.

Subtitled ‘Grand Tours, Minor Visitations, Miraculous Journey and a Few Good Meals’, Walking Backwards recalls visits to Istanbul, New Delhi, Paris, Venice, Rome, Delphi, Mantua, Alba and Boulder, Colorado from the past forty years. You can read a short excerpt on his blog– www.markfrutkin.blogspot.com

MARK FRUTKIN is the author of three books of poetry and seven of fiction, including Fabrizio’s Return, winner of the 2006 Trillium Book Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, and Atmospheres Apollinaire, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium and the Ottawa Book Award. He lives in Ottawa.