A collection of short stories in which the characters misjudge things, find themselves in the wrong place, and who doggedly follow the wrong path, such as the vegetable market stallholder who decides to stand for election against the local Mafia boss.
Ten years ago Jeanie Long was charged with the murder of 15-year old Abigail Mantel. Now new evidence has proved Jeanie's innocence. But Jeanie commits suicide in her prison cell, unable to face the people who had believed her capable of killing a child. On hearing the news, Emma Bennett is haunted once more by memories of her vibrant best friend, Abigail, and by the thought that her killer is still at large.
It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby - and she doesn't want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her.