Rootless and Restless

Shivya Nath asks what happens when you give up the familiar and let curiosity pull you toward the far edges of the map. In Rootless and Restless, she swaps comfort for a deeply personal journey through some of the most remote places on the planet, looking for stories, customs and ways of living that hardly ever make it into print. Her route takes her from a tiny island deep in the Arctic to off-grid Indigenous communities in Myanmar and the bare mountain deserts of Uzbekistan. Not everything goes to plan. She gets caught up in a morality police raid in Iran, learns about centuries-old traditions in Japan, and comes face to face with the last living member of an entire species in the Pacific Ocean. The book is set against a world shaped by social media, cultural divides and climate change, and it makes the case that travel can be far more than collecting destinations. Done with openness, it leads to remarkable people and unexpected lessons, and it may change the traveller as much as the places she visits.