Travel Writing

Publishers Weekly

Debut novelist Ferry builds his quietly tricky tale around an English teacher's amateur investigation into a traffic fatality. Driving home from work, narrator Pete Ferry pulls up beside a car being erratically driven; Pete considers taking action, but before he can, the car crashes into a lamp post, killing Lisa Kim, the young driver. The event haunts Pete, a high school English teacher and occasional travel writer, and he soon neglects his professional duties as he looks into who Lisa was and why she died. Pete is so obsessed with his quarry that he does not notice that his relationship with live-in girlfriend Lydia is failing, though he does turn up leads to Lisa's heroin connection and a sinister psychiatrist. Or perhaps not: Pete addresses much of his narrative to his English class, and it is not clear whether the reader is meant to believe that the car accident and ensuing intrigues have actually happened, or if Pete has invented them to teach his students a lesson about storytelling. The result is a novel that, for all the cleverness of its construction, is also earnest, engrossing and affecting. (Aug.)

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Library Journal

Ferry's undeniably clever debut novel, full of metafictional razzle-dazzle, is about a high school English teacher, also named Peter Ferry, who hooks his students on a story of murder and obsession. Patient listeners with a taste for fiction about fiction will find ample rewards, though Anthony Heald's (www.anthonyheald.com) carefully enunciated reading is slightly at odds with the book's conversational tone. This is an admirable title that is nonetheless difficult to recommend as essential since it hasn't resonated in print with a large audience. If you buy strictly on merit, though, go for it. [With tracks every three minutes for bookmarking; audio clip available through blackstoneaudio.com; the Harcourt hc was recommended "for readers interested in experimental fiction and psychological puzzles," LJ5/1/08.-Ed.]
—John Hiett

School Library Journal

Adult/High School

Ferry takes readers on a storyteller's journey. As a high school English teacher and part-time travel writer, he uses fictionalized situations to engage his students' interest, and readers can never quite be sure whether he is telling them about real or fictitious events. After witnessing a fatal car accident, which Ferry believes he could have prevented, he finds himself drawn into the story of Lisa Kim, the victim. The book moves back and forth between Ferry's life and past and his connections, real or imagined, to Lisa Kim. The author does not follow chronological order or standard format in his story line, but instead moves between the past and present to allow readers a glimpse into the impact they have on others. Or do they? When the narrator delivers the line "what I'm saying is that very often illusion is all we have," it does make readers wonder if they have been taken for a ride. This book provides a unique, stylish, and challenging read for AP literature students and/or those interested in creative writing and the writing process.-Janet Melikian, Central High School East, Fresno, CA

Kirkus Reviews

Imagination and literal truth collide intriguingly in this Chinese-box puzzle about a man obsessed with a car crash . . . or is he?First-time novelist Ferry gives his own versatile professional life, as well as his name, to his protagonist: a high-school teacher in the upscale Chicago suburb of Lake Forest who moonlights as a writer of travel essays. Narrator Pete Ferry's carefully orchestrated life becomes surreal after he witnesses a traffic accident in which a young woman named Lisa Kim is killed. Or so Pete tells his writing students-a roomful of quick-witted teenagers, each sharply individualized-adding the playful codicil that the incident may not have actually occurred, may instead be an idea intended to challenge their creative powers. What Pete believes gradually emerges from a constantly shifting narrative in which he journeys to various places (Mexico, Thailand, Ontario) for writing assignments, shares his speculations and suspicions with friends and nearly runs aground irreparably with Lydia, who either is or isn't the woman he loves. Obsessed with the mysterious Lisa Kim, a gifted actress and perhaps also a promiscuous drug addict, Pete attends her funeral, is mistaken for someone close to her and slowly closes in on crucial details about her death. He'd briefly glimpsed another car at the scene of the accident, and he eventually encounters its occupant in a tense denouement that confirms his hunches. Unless, as he reports back to his students, he's made the whole thing up. This is a witty novel about its own provenance, an exploration of the ambiguous ways in which the writer's imagination works. Its sly circumlocutions recall Frederick Exley's classic 1968 anti-novel AFan's Notes, and the motions of its perfectly engineered plot raise memories of Humbert Humbert stalking archvillain Clare Quilty in Nabokov's Lolita. Novel or not-novel, it's one hell of a fictional debut. Agent: Lorin Rees/Helen Rees Literary Agency

Chicago Tribune - Donna Seaman

"Travel Writing is an absolute pleasure to read. It is ensnaring, funny, suspenseful, smart and poignant.... Peter Ferry fits stories within stories like mirrors reflecting mirrors to expose our assumptions about fact and the imagination. When his protagonist declares, 'I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order,' he offers a clue to the mission underliying this immensely entertaining, keenly conceived and brilliantly realized puzzle of a novel. Ferry is offering us a covert refresher course in the revelatory power of story, the responsibility of writers and the unending hunger for truth."

Entertainment Weekly

"Shockingly, it succeeds as both a rich character study and a twisty whodunit, adding one more voice to the lively conversation about the boundaries between memoir and fiction. A- "

Booklist

"[A] winning first novel...Ferry's prose is so entrancing, his mild-mannered yet covertly audacious hero is so compelling, there is nothing intrusive or pretentious about this metafiction setup...A mordently funny and diabolically smart novel of happenstance and responsibility."

Time Magazines Literary Supplement (UK)

"Compelling.... Ferry builds suspense skillfully.... Travel Writing illustrates the power of several kinds of story: love stories, travelogues, parables, family anecdotes, moral tales and the yarns people tell after a few beers late at night..."

The Observer (UK)

"[T]his is a soulful and well-written page-turner."

Arena Magazine (UK)

"Ferry's first novel is a fresh take on the sometimes fatigued option that writers take of writing about writing, as he intelligently plays with the notions of fact and fiction, illusion and reality.... A playful, thoughtful debut."

Nuvo Newsweekly

A darn good yarn, capable of taking you to that place where all you want to do is turn the next page...to see what happens next.

Los Angeles Times

One of those fabulously intricate novels in which you never quite know what is true and what is not—a book that becomes an exercise and exploration of the ubiquitous existence of storytelling in our lives. In other words, a perfect first novel.

Washington Post Book World

Peter Ferry's carefully wrought first novel...comes alive in the classroom and on the road. What draws us into "Travel Writing " is the author's pure love of teaching and his thirst for travel.

Dave Eggers

"The book is totally captivating and page-turning on one level, beautifully written and in touch with the good living of life (in a Hemingway sort of way) on another level, and all the while it raises all kinds of fascinating questions about fiction and fact, the writing process and teaching of literature. That it does all this and manages to be always honest and full of soul is truly remarkable."

Joe Queenan

"An ingenious novel: part mystery, part love story, partly a commentary on the art of writing fiction itself. A post-modern Rear Window with some snappy travel writing thrown in. A splendid debut by a novelist who has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about novels."

Big Issue (UK) - Emmanuelle Smith

"Truly gripping."

Literary Review (UK) - Philip Womack

"Genuinely thrilling and leads to a powerful and troubling climax."

Aesthetica Magazine (UK)

"Peter Ferry's first novel immediately captures the reader's imagination, drawing you into a story filled with humour, tenderness and suspense...as entertaining as it is intriguing and not to be missed."

Free Lance-Star - Kurt Rabin

On the strength of his new fiction...his next signing ought to be for a multi-book deal...Travel Writing is a memoir, a travelogue, and a detective story. It's great storytelling delights.

Chicago Sun Times - Mary Houlihan

In the cleverly constructed novel, Ferry toys with some interesting ideas, mainly the line that exists between fact and fiction.