ASTRAY

From the bestselling author of Room and The Sealed Letter comes a series of fourteen fact-inspired fictions about travels to, in and from North America. With the turn of each page, the protagonists of these stories go astray in various senses. They are emigrants, runaways, drifters; gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross borders of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, under duress or incognito. Astray transports the reader from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, from antebellum Louisiana to a 1960s Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. The book offers a past in scattered pieces, a moving history for restless times.