FROM THE EDITOR

The world is starting to unfurl. As it opens up, it reveals choices. And with those choices comes the question – where to go?

I’ve been fanning the flames by travelling through books and immersing myself in rich descriptions conjured by authors who know how to transport me to a tiny village in France or a bustling city in Japan.

Take Sarah Winman’s Still Life. Beautifully written with a sense of whimsy, the novel won me over when the main character, Ulysses Temper, decamped to the historic district of Santo Spirito in Florence and turned an apartment into a pensione. I defy you to read it and not wish you were sitting at a table at the fictional Michele’s on a balmy spring evening, supping on fiori di zucchini fritti and a jug of sangiovese.

Reading Still Life encouraged me to dip back into Polly Samson’s A Theatre For Dreamers, which details the hedonistic period that Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston lived on the Greek isle of Hydra. Through a vivid setting and a wonderful roll call of characters (including Leonard Cohen), it’s an idyllic portal into the Greece we’re all fantasising about right now.

As I write this letter, I’m reading a very different book. Mia Kankimäki is a 42-year-old Finnish writer who sets out on a journey of soul-searching. In The Women I Think About at Night: Travelling the Paths of My Heroes, she travels to Africa, Japan and Italy to retrace the steps of writer Karen Blixen, explorer Isabella Bird and artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

Africa has a special place in my heart and I revelled in Blixen’s words: “I have looked into the eyes of lions and slept under the Southern Cross. I have seen the grass of the great plains ablaze and covered with delicate green after the rains...”

Africa. Greece. Italy. Each presents a different travel experience and yet they all offer the same thing. An opportunity for discovery, transformation and just sheer joy.

I hope you enjoy the issue and, in particular, our focus on a European summer to remember.