Author: Cheryl Strayed

Nominated By: Janice Verity

non-fiction

This is a memoir written 15 years after the fact. The author tells a compelling story. When she was in her early twenties, she lost her mother and her family began to fall apart and she started making very bad choices in life. She was bereft about her very mother's death. To get her life together, she decides to hike the Pacific Coast Train from Mojave in California to Oregon.  She tells of this journey in vivid language and with high emotional fervor. Her hike is to assuage her grief and for her to find her center. When you read it, you are there with her!  I found the writing to be very clear and her self-discovery to be very real for a twenty-plus year old woman

More: New York Times