Pat White has been moving for most of his life, first as the child of a railway worker, then as an adult attempting to escape the damage wrought on him as a child and find a place and a way to live. He writes powerfully about his family and the forces that drove them, the effect of landscape and the physical world, his art and writing, his relationships, his struggle with restlessness, and the need we all have to belong. There isn’t a lot of this kind of writing being published in New Zealand; Geoff Park is probably the other writer who has worked successfully in this area. It’s no surprise that Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry appear in the bibliography. This is a very good memoir, which deserves a wide readership.