In the tradition of Jill Ker Conway's bestselling autobiography, The Road from Coorain, Geraldine Brooks's Foreign Correspondence is a memoir of an idyllic girlhood in the middle-class western suburbs of Sydney, Australia in the 1960s and 70s. The international pen friendships she forged with correspondents in France, the Middle East, New Jersey, and even one right across town, enriched her life and, ultimately, led to a career abroad as a foreign correspondent. As Brooks comes of age, so does Australia, and interwoven with her personal narrative is the story of her country's emergence from a parochial migrant colony to a diverse and fu11y mature independent nation.

Brooks goes from the protected environment of a Catholic girls school to the University of Sydney, and at the age of twenty, leaves the family home to finish university in her very own flat near the bustling Sydney harbor. She hires on as an intern at the Sydney Morning Herald and then makes the momentous and thrilling decision to leave Australia and attend the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, which leads to an illustrious career as a globe-trotting reporter.

But she never forgets "that other foreign correspondent — the passionate young girl in faraway Sydney who dreamed of adventures in dangerous places." Brooks realizes that her pen pals were more than just a childhood phase. Rather, they have shaped her very being, and so she decides to track them down in adulthood. In so doing, she embarks on a bittersweet journey of self-discovery that takes her around the world on the most meaningful assignment of her life. Candid, thoughtful, and immediately captivating, Foreign Correspondence is a story about the ties of family, friends, and place, the conflicts of tradition and change, and the longing for a life elsewhere.

"Geraldine Brooks's talent is unique: she combines the hardest-hitting reporting with a true writer's sensitivity and an empathy rare for anyone. In Foreign Correspondence she trains her lucid gaze on the turmoil of female adolescence and by doing so brings us a dazzling range of insights that extend beyond introspection to raise questions about national identity in an increasingly global culture." Naomi Wolf, author of Promiscuities

"An evocative, superbly written tale of a woman's journey to self-understanding....Alternately stirring and humorous, it offers an incisive emotional and spiritual travelogue, as well as the chronicle of an era." Kirkus Reviews

"[C]harming and sharply intelligent, with much to say about growing up female and geographically unconnected....Foreign Correspondence is full of a generous interest in the life beyond the self. Geraldine Brooks is one of those writers who have truly gone out into the world, and she has sent back her dispatches with grace and good humor." Valerie Sayers, New York Times Book Review

"This lyrical, compelling book, which takes us around the world and through time, turns out to be very much a story about family and self, and about Brooks's journey toward a home of her own." Washington Post Book World

"One of the better memoirs to come along, in an overcrowded field, in some time." The Wall Street Journal

"A thought-provoking memoir, opens a window on an Australian childhood?filled with charming anecdote and careful introspection." Philadelphia Inquirer

"Shifting effortlessly through time and place, this scintillating book details Brooks's evolution from restless teen to award-winning journalist, starting with the seductive tales of her pen pals." GQ

"Intimate, thoughtful, and also very funny?In a literary landscape that has become glutted with memoirs, Foreign Correspondence is a keeper. With a deft touch, Brooks weaves the personal into the political, the domestic into the foreign, and the past into the present." Seattle Times

Born on Bland Street in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid places where history happens and culture comes from. She enlists pen pals who offer her a window on the hazards of adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. With the aid of their letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests, the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz. Twenty years later - and worlds away from her sheltered girlhood - Brooks is an award-winning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, reporting on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa. But she never forgets her earlier foreign correspondence. Traveling full circle to attend her dying father, Brooks stumbles on the old letters in her parents' basement. She embarks on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends, and to retrieve her own lost memories of the shy Sydney girl who wrote to them. One by one, she finds men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of a mysterious and tragic mental illness. It is only from the distance of foreign lands and against the background of alien lives that Brooks finally sees her homeplace clearly. This intimate, moving, and often humorous memoir of growing up Down Under speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world.

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness. Intimate, moving, and often humorous, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world.