Woman Alone: A Six Month Journey Through the Australian Outback

For fans of Cheryl Strayeds Wild and Elizabeth Gilberts Eat Pray Love.At twenty-seven Laine Cunningham seemed to have it all: tons of friends a college degree plenty of all-night parties and a secure job. Yet every morning she dragged herself through a life that was corporatized and overly industrialized a life that falsely glamorized everything she was supposed to want.Guided only by a map pulled from an old copy of National Geographic she camped in the Australian Outback for six months...and she did it alone.Traveling in a time before Expedia or Travelocity and without any guidebook or travel guide from Lonely Planet the trip was never intended to be a vacation. Instead it was a search for something deeper something that lay inside. Cheap plane tickets or the cost of the airfare were far less important than the investment Laine made in herself.The self-guided adventure tour around the country covered nearly 17000 miles. Hostels were preferred to hotels and then only when camping under the stars wasnt an option. Otherwise her best accommodation was the red sand and her only travel guide was her instinct about where on the map to explore next.Told with warm humor and sparked with suspense the search revealed a womans most important discovery: herself.Laine Cunningham a three-time recipient of The Hackney Award writes fiction that takes readers around the world. Her debut novel The Family Made of Dust is set in the Australian Outback while Reparation is a novel of the American Great Plains. She is the editor of Sunspot Literary Journal.