Memory Road Trip

MEMORY ROAD TRIP is a collection of travel stories ranging from the sublime to the surreal as recounted by a former travel agent who saw the world on the cheap. The journey down memory road is a heartfelt excursion into the past that takes armchair explorers on an odyssey of life, love, and loneliness. The circuitous path is full of philosophical nooks and crannies, and many stories get told from the bottom of a well. Many of Krista's stories speak to the angst that simmers inside all of us as we confront the many absurdities that exist in this world. Her passion for nature, art, history, and architecture gush across the page, along with her contagious curiosity in life and her pragmatic acceptance of death. MEMORY ROAD TRIP is not only an adventurous journey to certain parts of the globe, but it is also an introspective and witty journey to the mysterious self. For as large as the world is, it has grown infinitely smaller, yet currently exists relatively out of reach. Travel, for the moment, is safer done mentally these days, so now's the time to go on a MEMORY ROAD TRIP with someone who knows the way.

Despite knowing it’s a mad idea, Lily agrees to take her mother on one last road trip around the UK, in this new novel by the bestselling author of His Other Woman. This trip will be challenging because Lily’s mother can no longer be described as “just a bit forgetful”: Moira has started talking to imaginary friends and singing ABBA songs in public, and last week she began emptying boxes of cereal onto the floor in the supermarket. Lily is worried and embarrassed by her mother’s behavior but, despite her recent dementia diagnosis, Moira is happy—albeit in a sweary sort of way—and insists the journey will help her write a memoir. As they trundle across the country in an ancient VW campervan, Lily feels the strain as she struggles to deal with her mother’s decline, her own daughter’s criticism and her ex-husband’s upcoming wedding plans to a younger woman. One night, leaving Moira alone in the hotel, Lily meets a man in a bar and, for the first time in years, she feels alive. This road trip was intended to celebrate the past. But will it end in crisis, or might Lily’s chance encounter help build a new future for this fractured family? Praise for Sarah Edghill’s A Thousand Tiny Disappointments “Thoroughly gripping . . . Sarah Edghill knows how to pinpoint what goes on in families.” —Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry “An accomplished, moving and ultimately uplifting novel.” —Hannah Persaud, author of The Codes of Love

"This will cast a spell on fans of Cheryl Strayed and Glennon Doyle." - Publishers Weekly Between Two Kingdoms meets Wild. In this heart wrenching and inspirational memoir a woman and her mother, who is suffering from dementia, embark on a road trip through national parks, revisiting the memories, and the mountains, that made them who they are. Steph Jagger lost her mother before she lost her. Her mother, stricken with an incurable disease that slowly erases all sense of self, struggles to remember her favorite drink, her favorite song, and—perhaps most heartbreaking of all—Steph herself. Steph watches as the woman who loved and raised her slips away before getting the chance to tell her story, and so Steph makes a promise: her mother will walk it and she will write it. Too aware of her mother’s waning memory, Steph proposes that the two take a camping trip out to Montana—which her mother, on the urging of Steph’s father, agrees to embark upon. An adventure full of horseback riding, hiking, and “tenting” out West quickly turns into one woman’s reflection on childhood, motherhood, personhood—and what it means to love someone who doesn’t quite remember the person she spent her lifetime becoming. A staggeringly beautiful examination of how stories are passed down through generations and from Mother Nature, Everything Left to Remember brings us the wisdom of who our memories make us under the constellations of the vast Montana sky.

“A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane” (Kirkus Reviews), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! offers a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips—before portable DVD players, smartphones, and Google Maps. The birth of America’s first interstate highways in the 1950s hit the gas pedal on the road trip phenomenon and families were soon streaming—sans seatbelts!—to a range of sometimes stirring, sometimes wacky locations. In the days before cheap air travel, families didn’t so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them—from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks. Now, decades later, Ratay offers “an amiable guide…fun and informative” (New York Newsday) that “goes down like a cold lemonade on a hot summer’s day” (The Wall Street Journal). In hundreds of amusing ways, he reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great, including twenty-foot “land yachts,” oasis-like Holiday Inn “Holidomes,” “Smokey”-spotting Fuzzbusters, twenty-eight glorious flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, and the thrill of finding a “good buddy” on the CB radio. An “informative, often hilarious family narrative [that] perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many have with road trips” (Publishers Weekly), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! reveals how the family road trip came to be, how its evolution mirrored the country’s, and why those magical journeys that once brought families together—for better and worse—have largely disappeared.

After serving his country with distinction, Stewart Masterson is rewarded with detention in an assisted living facility by a government agency concerned with his advancing Alzheimer's disease. This story gives us a glimpse into a world that is far more relevant to the brave individuals facing personal limitations than we could possibly imagine.

A fearless and masterful novel from the Stella Prize-winning author Carrie Tiffany, now in a new paperback edition

Looking for travel planners that can double as a travel diary? How about a child travel journal to kindle the love of exploring in your child? Do you want a holiday journal and a memory book that can be used to showcase your travel photo albums? For people who love to travel, it is often a worry if their child would share the same passion for seeing new places as children usually likes routine. Some parents worry about not being able to keep documentations or memories of vacation moments spent with their child. These are the reasons why we created the Travel Memory Book as a part of the Spirala Memories Journals collection. With the help of this travel diary and holiday journal, getting your child interested in travel and documenting all the fun vacation times you spent together is made easy and organized. It is the perfect child travel journal which adults would love as well.

“A thoroughly gripping story about grief [and] unexpected friendship . . . Sarah Edghill knows how to pinpoint what goes on in families.” —Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry Martha is being pulled in too many directions, trying to be a good mother, a loving wife, and a dutiful daughter. Despite it all, she’s coping. But then her elderly mother is rushed to the hospital and dies unexpectedly, and the cracks in the life Martha is struggling to hold together are about to be exposed. When she discovers her mother has left her house to a stranger, she’s overwhelmed by grief and hurt. Getting no support from her disinterested husband or arrogant brother, Martha goes on to make some bad decisions. If she were a good daughter, she would abide by her mother’s final wishes. If she were a good daughter, she wouldn’t destroy the evidence . . . “An accomplished first novel with characters you can relate to, who are struggling with interesting moral dilemmas.” —Katie Fforde, author of A Country Escape and A Wedding in Provence “Compelling and beautifully written, Edghill explores grief, regret and self reconciliation in her debut novel. A Thousand Tiny Disappointments is an accomplished, moving and ultimately uplifting novel about friendship and love.” —Hannah Persaud, author of The Codes of Love “A brilliant story about taking back control of your life. Martha is my new hero. So readable, so relatable.” —Ericka Waller, author of Dog Days