Astray: A History of Wandering

A meandering celebration of the indirect and unforeseen path, revealing that to err is not just human--it is everything.

This book explores how, far from being an act limited to deviation from known pathways or desirable plans of action, wandering is an abundant source of meaning--a force as intimately involved in the history of our universe as it will be in the future of our planet. In ancient Australian Aboriginal cosmology, in works about the origins of democracy and surviving disasters in ancient Greece, in Eurasian steppe nomadic culture, in the lifeways of the Roma, in the movements of today’s refugees, and in our attempts to preserve spaces of untracked online freedom, wandering is how creativity and skills of adaptation are preserved in the interests of ongoing life. Astray is an enthralling look at belonging and at notions of alienation and hope.

Eluned Summers-Bremner is a senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of Insomnia: A Cultural History, also published by Reaktion Books.