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W&N acquires bereft fiancée's debut memoir Traveling with Ghosts
Weidenfeld & Nicolson has acquired a "haunting" memoir of love and loss, Traveling with Ghosts.
Jennifer Kerslake, editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, acquired UK & Commonwealth rights from Marie Florio at Simon & Schuster US, to publish in hardback on 23rd February 2017.
Traveling with Ghosts chronicles the journey Shannon Leone Fowler took through Eastern Europe following the death of her young fiancé, Sean, in Thailand, after he was killed in the summer of 2002 by a box jellyfish, the most venomous animal in the world.
Fowler's new journey, to forge a path through sorrow towards recovery, took her from Auschwitz in Poland to war-torn Israel and shelled-out Bosnia, and finally to Barcelona, where she first met her fiancé years before.
Kerslake said: "I was deeply moved by this memoir. Heartbreakingly raw and beautifully compelling, Traveling with Ghosts shows how life can change in an instant and how not to let it destroy you. Shannon is an extraordinary writer. She weaves the narrative of Sean’s death with the story of how they fell in love and her journey to come to terms with the tragedy, laying bare the truth of her experience with profound insight. I think this is a very important work on grief that is going to touch and help a lot of people. I couldn’t be more delighted to be publishing it at W&N."
Fowler commented: "Traveling with Ghosts is about my search for a path through grief, in countries and cultures that dealt with death in ways my own did not. It’s a story about finding love and learning to live with loss. But mostly, it’s a story about all the places in between."
Fowler is a marine biologist and writer. Since her doctorate on Australian sea lions, she’s taught marine ecology in the Bahamas and Galapagos, led a university course on killer whales in the San Juan Islands, spent a number of seasons as marine mammal biologist on board ships in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and worked as a science writer at National Public Radio in Washington, DC.
