Traveling with Ghosts: A Memoir

Part travel memoir, part memoir about grief, this is an elegantly told story. Having met a young Australian while traveling in Europe, Fowler, then a PhD candidate in marine biology, becomes engaged to him and then, only days later, tragedy strikes. On a beach in Thailand, her fiance, Sean, is stung by a box jellyfish and dies. The book is about that horrible incident, but it's also about their joyous travels together before he died and, critically, her need to travel alone after his death. Which means this is not an easy book to read, because she is struggling daily to cope with Sean's death, and so much of what she sees on her journey through Eastern Europe and Israel only brings him to mind. It's beautifully written and a moving story.