It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
The Wandering

The Wandering

Summary

*The most unusual novel you will read all year, where you create your own story*

'An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge' Lauren Elkin, Guardian

Longlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize

You've grown roots, you're gathering moss. You're desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go.

Turn the page and make your choice.

You may become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet other travellers with their own stories to tell. Freedom awaits but borders are real. And no story is ever new.

'Sets you free to roam the Earth... an incisive commentary on the cosmopolitan condition' Tiffany Tsao

'An electrifying novel about cosmopolitanism and global nomadism that keeps readers on their toes' Book Riot


Winner of an English PEN Translates Award, and a Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America

Reviews

  • An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge... Questions such as: “Where am I going?”... “Which choice will make my life worthwhile?” feel existential and urgent... Who can travel, and on what conditions, is one of the primary human rights questions of our era, and The Wandering skilfully takes it on.
    Lauren Elkin, Guardian

About the author

Intan Paramaditha

Intan Paramaditha is a writer and academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker, Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction Prize in Indonesia, the English PEN Translates Award and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short-story collection Apple and Knife and editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series by Tilted Axis Press. Her essay 'On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel' was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a PhD from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. intanparamaditha.com
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more