Mary Morris

Mary Morris is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels Gateway to the Moon, The Jazz Palace, A Mother’s Love, and House Arrest, and also of nonfiction, including the travel classic Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. A casual afternoon of ice skating in February 2008 derailed the trip of a lifetime. Mary Morris was on the verge of a sabbatical, but instead she endured three months in a wheelchair, two surgeries, and extensive rehabilitation. On Easter Sunday, when she was supposed to be in Morocco, Morris was instead lying on the sofa with Death in Venice, reading again and again: “He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers.” Disaster shifted to possibility and she made a decision: when she was well enough to walk again (and her doctor wasn’t sure she ever would), she would go “all the way to the tigers.” So begins a three-year odyssey that takes Morris to India in search of the world’s most elusive apex predator. Her first lesson: don’t look for a tiger because you won’t find it–you look for signs of a tiger. And all unseen tigers, hiding in the bush, are referred to as “she.” Her weeks on tiger safari also afford a new understanding of herself. Written in over a hundred short chapters, All the Way to the Tigers (Nan A. Talese) offers an elegiac, wry, and wise look at a woman on the road and the glorious, elusive creature she seeks. New York Times Book Review called All the Way to the Tigers “a travel memoir and quest. [and] the reader is stalking the elusive striped beast alongside the narrator.”