{"product_id":"in-spite-of-myself-mary-fogarty-9781804699034","title":"In Spite of Myself","description":"If you have ever felt too shy, too old, or too plain for adventure - In Spite of Myself is for you.   Growing up as a painfully timid child in Kenya, Mary Fogarty discovers that independence is not something you are born with - it is something you swim towards, stumble upon, and seize when nobody is watching. Sometime journalist, sometime travel guide, always an outsider (and always a swimmer), Fogarty looks back on decades of spontaneous solo travel across five continents with self-deprecating honesty, warmth, and razor-sharp wit.   Wherever she journeys - from Milan to Mexico, Perth to Peru, mountains to souks - she feels marked by difference. Her teenage self is branded an African savage at a British convent school; in Italy she is a country bumpkin in the city yet the only foreigner in the village; in Australia, the lone Pom in a Macedonian community; in Spain, the only single expat among couples. Sometimes following love, sometimes finding it once she arrives, Fogarty flings herself into relationships both magnificent and disastrous - with a cast of unlikely characters no novelist would dare invent.   Gawp as she meets an Egyptian doctor on the night train to Cairo; takes off across the desert with a Syrian bus driver in search of a hotel that serves alcohol; shares a sleeping bag with a Sherpa on the descent from Everest to cure her altitude sickness; encounters an Omar Sharif lookalike in Australia, only to discover he is sleeping in his office and growing marijuana in the flowerpots - and is nearly murdered by the new girlfriend of her Berber ex-lover in Marrakech.   Simultaneously intensely personal and irresistibly universal, In Spite of Myself is for anyone who worries about being alone - and proof that there is always a way, and you can do it on your own.","brand":"Bradt Travel Guides","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51894284157216,"sku":"9781804699034","price":8.49,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0753\/2812\/7264\/files\/9781804699034_2911393.jpg?v=1782020767","url":"https:\/\/bookcorner.com\/products\/in-spite-of-myself-mary-fogarty-9781804699034","provider":"The Book Corner","version":"1.0","type":"link"}