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Start giftingOff the Tracks
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Train travel is having a renaissance. Grand old routes that had been canceled, or were moldering in neglect, have been refurbished as destinations in themselves. The Rocky Mountaineer, the Orient Express, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad run again in all their glory.
Pamela Mulloy has always loved train travel. Whether returning to the Maritimes every year with her daughter on the Ocean, or taking her family across Europe to Poland, trains have been a linchpin of her life. As COVID locked us down, Mulloy began an imaginary journey that recalled the trips she has taken, as well as those of others. Whether it was Mary Wollstonecraft traveling alone to Sweden in the late 1700s, or the incident that had Charles Dickens forever fearful of trains, or the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt trapped in her carriage in a midwestern blizzard in the 1890s, or Sir John A. Macdonald’s wife daring to cross the Rockies tied to the cowcatcher at the front of the train, the stories explore the odd mix of adventure and contemplation that travel permits.
Thoughtful, observant, and fun, Off the Tracks is the perfect blend of research and personal experience that, like a good train ride, will whisk you into another world.
Reviews
“Readers will be persuaded that traveling can be more than a means for getting from point A to point B.” — Publishers Weekly
“Off the Tracks is an enchanting, lyrical reflection on memory, travel, and passenger trains … With pensive, evocative accounts of trains and travel, Off the Tracks is a lovely, immersive book about how our physical and mental journeys shape us.” — Foreword Reviews
“The book’s vignettes cover many aspects of train travel … The vision of shining rails leading to new horizons holds [the book] together.” — Library Journal
“I read Off the Tracks in one sitting, on a couch by a window that transformed into a European couchette, a stagecoach, a dining car speeding through a Maritime landscape and more on journeys that were remembered, imagined, and hoped for. Sparked by a stillness in time, Mulloy writes in beautiful, spare prose of travel as an act of the mind and memory, the ever-changing notion of home, and covers landscapes that are both geographic and metaphoric. Her travelling companions are historic as well as intimate, and always interesting, while Mulloy is a thoughtful, nuanced, and engaging guide.” — Emily Urquhart, author of Ordinary Wonder Tales
“Pamela Mulloy’s Off the Tracks is like ‘slow travel’ itself: absorbing, with many grace notes of observant and profound perceptions on the whole project of moving across space—preferably by train. Like Rebecca Solnit, Mulloy is an expert storyteller, allowing her personal relationship with travel to open doors onto travel’s relationship with history, gender, politics, and the whole project of selfhood. Perceptively written, it is full of fascinating insights on how travel allows us to discover and understand our world.” —Jean McNeil
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