Going Where My Pig Is Headed

What makes someone suddenly, for no apparent reason, reject the pattern of her life? Leave her job, her lover, her friends; sell her house and every possession to walk out into the world one day, with barely a backward glance?In 1977, a 40-year old advertising copywriter at London’s J Walter Thompson decided that she must learn Modern Greek. This decision led Sara Sharpe to spend seven years on the road, travelling alone through Greece, Turkey and much of the Middle East. In 1984 she came home. Twenty years later, she revisited Likos, the Greek island she’d first encountered in 1980 and took out of their boxes the hundreds of pages of travel diaries she’d compiled during her vagabond days. Going Where My Pig Is Headed tells the story of those days.Sara’s diaries from 1977 to1984 combine improbable scrapes and adventures with poignant encounters and hilarious observations. But unlike many travel writers, she is able to view herself from the distance of 20 years, and question her motivation. Why did she have to go? And what were the consequences? Going Where My Pig Is Headed, by the author of the acclaimed Liontooth: the story of a garden, is for everyone who ever wondered what might happen if..."Today the rains which obligingly stopped for the Virgin are back. A grey sea with heaving spume. A bitter wind. A freighter from Thessaloniki is slumped against the quayside, its hull scarred and rusty, the R of ALEXANDROU missing. Staring at it, I let my mind wander back to the north of Greece, to the old kingdom of Alexander and a golden July beside a lake.."