All the Way to the Tigers: A Memoir

Determined to move beyond a debilitating injury, novelist Morris (Gateway to the Moon) treks solo across India hoping to come face-to-face with a tiger in this engrossing tale. A hundred-plus short chapters cover Morris’s weekslong tiger safaris through jungles and savannas. Interspersed throughout are scenes of Morris’s ice skating accident, in which she fractured her ankle; moments of uncertainty over her recovery; and nuggets of trivia about tigers. Childhood flashbacks reveal her recurring dream of tigers, her angry but loving father, and her cruelly unsympathetic mother who nonetheless takes the teenage Morris on a whirlwind tour of Europe, sowing the seeds of a lifelong wanderlust. She writes, “Real travelers, like real writers, move through the world... with a child’s sense of wonder and surprise.” This wonder bolsters her through daily tours in an open jeep, a bout of bronchitis, and unheated accommodations during one of India’s coldest winters. Though she eventually encounters a tiger in the wild, an epiphany comes on the trip home when, lost in a Mumbai slum, “strangers who have nothing are showing me the way.” The tiger, it turns out, “was never really the point.... It was always about the journey.” Morris’s descriptions of remote beauty, grinding urban poverty, and exotic adventures will captivate armchair tourists and travel memoir fans. (June)