The Book!! Slow Journey South is out
21 comments March 26th, 2008
Hello all –
Well, it is finally here! “Slow Journey South”, my first book, goes on sale in Australia on the 1st of April – widely available in all book stores.
Now, as for those of you not lucky enough to live in Australia (ha, ha, ha) it has taken me some time to come up with an alternative. Just to explain the details to you – until my publishers, Random House, have secured overseas publishers in various countries (unlikely to happen until my book has proven sales in Australia) they will not sell the rights to Amazon, as that would substantially lessen the chances of gaining said publisher.
So the solution we have finally come up with is that the link on this site will go to a store called Gleebooks, in Sydney, who can arrange for sales to overseas.
THIS IS THE LINK: http://www.gleebooks.com.au/default.asp?p=displaybook_asp?bookCode=9781741667967
Here is the first review I received, from the Australia Bookseller and Publisher magazine, I was dead chuffed because this mag goes out to all the various book outlets and buyers, and the review was written by a lady who buys for Angus & Robertson, one of Australia’s biggest book outlets; getting four stars made my day!
Australian Paula Constant has written a lifeaffirming, positive, inspiring and informative narrative of her emotional and physical journey to give up a teaching job in London and walk for three years with her husband—walking out of Trafalgar Square in central London to France, Spain and along the Camino Santiago pilgrim’s walk to Portugal. The book finishes as they reach Africa, but it is far from over as her main dream is to walk right to Cape Town. The ending is left open for a second book that will hopefully cover the remainder of their walk through the Sahara with camels, right down to Cape Town in South Africa. Paula’s voice is a fresh and
compelling one. She writes really well in this genre and is thoroughly inspirational—giving much in the way of personal learnings and insights about life. Slow Journey South will appeal to those that have an interest in travel stories, those that are interested
in walking and hiking and those that enjoy reading about Africa and the Camino Santiago. This is one of the finest examples of travel literature in a long time!
Melanie Barton is fiction category manager at Angus & Robertson
This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker
The official in-store date for the book is 1st of April, although it may be possible to find it a week before then (yeah right, Paula, like there are going to be mad queues….) and trust me – I will be there accosting unwitting shoppers and coercing them into buying a book!! It is hard not to feel excited, it has been so long coming and feels great to finally have “evidence” of my walk out there – my own story.
It has also helped reinvigorate me in planning the next leg. I received an email from Niger today – after a move by the rebel MNJ Tuareg forces (whom the Nigerienne government, in their wisdom, refuse to negotiate with as they are considered little more than bandits and drug runners rather than legitimate complainants) to release 25 prisoners – a move largely seen as a peaceful overture in part engineered by Libya – the MNJ has unfortunately gone on to launch another attack on a military base, killing two. I cringe every time I hear news such as this, as every incident lessens my chances of returning to Niger this September. But this time around I will not be caught out again, and am organizing my plan B to enter in Libya in the event that Niger cannot get it together.
You can look at the goings on in Niger at www.niger1.com – I have been away from the desert long enough that it actually looks attractive to me once more!
I am busy writing the second book; seeing the first one actually in print has really helped to motivate me in a lot of ways. I find it very difficult at times – writing about my marriage break up for example is far from simple or easy. I also find it difficult often to really explain what it is like out there – I realize, reading back over my website and diaries, that I have become very accustomed to sanitizing my accounts, partly to avoid worrying anyone back home and partly because I was often so exhausted when I reached a town that I felt reluctant to go re live the last stretch I had been on. What interests me now is that in reading my diaries – which I have been doing lately for the first time since I got back – I remember so much that I had lost, or blocked out – whatever is the reality. And that can be difficult to write about, because I guess there was a lot of pretty hard stuff, and to some degree you can’t afford to dwell in that when you are out there doing it. It tends to come home to you long afterwards, waking you up in the night and making you flinch at involuntary times, or alternatively, bore the hell out of unsuspecting mates when you have had too much to drink. One friend said to me a few months ago, when I got into one of these accounts – “oh God Paula, not another bloody camel story” – and I thought: oh, dear, I think I better shut up.
So I try to restrict myself to those audiences who I know get it and are patient – my Mum, Graeme, Lachlan. It is a bit much to expect the general populous to have much interest in camel induced sleep deprivation!
Last week I went to Sydney to do the first of the publicity events for my book. This was the HDS booksellers conference – those are the guys who run the newslink outlets at airports, and various other brands worldwide. I addressed a conference of their regional managers and buys, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It is the first time I have done a talk about this book rather than the desert walk, and it was a joy to speak about the Europe walk again, to go right back to the beginning where all of this started. I ended with a passage from the book which I wanted to reproduce here, since I find it helpful to revisit myself, and a reminder of what is really important:
I think back to the person who sat on a sand dune and dreamed of walking through Africa, and I think of how truly powerful our dreams are, think that it is our dreams which tell us who we really are and what is important for us, that they are our identity, our reality, our comfort in the dark night and our defence against the false paths strewn in front of us by a society which does not honour their wisdom.
I think of how very close I came on so many occasions to deserting my dreams because they seemed too hard, or because people told me they were crazy. And then I think that this walk is the most important thing I have ever done, that I have learned more about myself and the world around me in this last year than I did in the thirty years before it, and I take a deep breath and throw back my head and look at the stars blazing with otherworldly power far above me in the clear crystal desert night and I feel the rip tide within surge and ebb once more and I think to myself:
There is nothing I cannot do.
I still love reading that passage. It reminds me of how it is out there.
I hope those of you who buy it enjoy it. And to the London mob – as soon as I have the advance copies in my hands, a copy will be winging its way to each of you, promise. Love you guys so much, Jo, Steph, Steve, Sarah, Dan and Stefania….I miss you.
Cheers.