Desert Places

From the author of the international bestseller Tracks comes a vivid memoir of the grueling migration season she spent with the nomads of northwestern India India's Thar Desert is a place of stark contrasts. Forming a natural border between Pakistan and India, the desert has been the home of the Rabari herders for thousands of years. In 1990, Australian travel writer Robyn Davidson spent a year with the Rabari, whose livelihood is increasingly endangered by India's rapid development. Enduring the daily hardships of life in the desert while immersed in the austere beauty of the arid landscape, Davidson subsisted on a diet of goat milk, roti, and parasite-infested water. She collided with India's rigid caste system and cultural idiosyncrasies, confronted extreme sleep deprivation, and fought feelings of alienation amid the nation's isolated rural peoples-finding both intense suffering and a renewed sense of beauty and belonging among the Rabari family. Rich with detail and honest in its depictions of cultural differences, Desert Places is an unforgettable story of fortitude in the face of struggle and an ode to the rapidly disappearing way of life of the herders of northwestern India.