Bad Tourist

2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Gold Medal Winner 2021 National Indie Excellent Awards Finalist 2020 Bronze Award for Travel Book or Guide from the North American Travel Journalists Association 2020 Bronze Winner for Travel in the Foreword INDIES

Both a memoir in travel essays and an anti-guidebook, Bad Tourist takes us across four continents to fifteen countries, showing us what not to do when traveling. A woman learning to claim her own desires and adventures, Suzanne Roberts encounters lightning and landslides, sharks and piranha-infested waters, a nightclub drugging, burning bodies, and brief affairs as she searches for the love of her life and finally herself. Throughout her travels Roberts tries hard not to be a bad tourist, but owing to her cultural blind spots, things don’t always go as planned. Fearlessly confessional, shamelessly funny, and wholly unapologetic, Roberts offers a refreshingly honest account of the joys and absurdities of confronting new landscapes and cultures, as well as new versions of herself. Raw, bawdy, and self-effacing, Bad Tourist is a journey packed with delights and surprises-both of the greater world and of the mysterious workings of the heart.

Author Biography

Suzanne Roberts is the author of Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Nebraska, 2012) and four collections of poetry. She was named the Next Great Travel Writer by National Geographic’s Traveler, and her work has been published in Best Women’s Travel Writing and listed as Notable in Best American Essays. She teaches for the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Sierra Nevada University. Visit her website: suzanneroberts.net.