“I began to notice how everything out there, in the wild, seemed to move. Oceans. Sharks. Wolves. Elephants. Rivers. Nothing stayed in the same place. I wanted to be like them too, and the only way to do this was to keep moving.”

When Kate Mathieson finds herself with nothing to show except a well-adorned house and too many business suits, she makes the sudden decision to leave everything behind, and begins an elemental journey across Africa.

Weaving a personal tale of reflection, adventure and discovery, Kate beautifully details the lives we have marked for ourselves – school, university, careers, marriages, mortgages, children, school – and that other life, the one that calls to us from dreams, and out of books, that suggests the life we are living, may not be ours.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Finch Memoir Prize, Ways to Come Home is a powerful memoir about the need to know who we really are, and what it means to find our way back home.