Billed as a novel, at first I was tempted to call Travel Writing a memoir written with a mixture of truth, half-truths, and invention; others, following the title, may see it as a collection of travel stories, and perhaps most think it’s a riveting detective story where Peter Ferry grows ever more obsessed to uncover the truth about Lisa Kim’s death, a stranger whom he glimpsed for a second before her car careened into a lamp post. The book is all of these, and each is enthralling in its own way.A recurring theme is love and death embodied in two women, his lively and independent girlfriend Lydia whose dwindling relationship makes up a good part of the novel. The other is the body of Lisa. His “true love” story is written all in future tense at the end. Death gets him started writing when he spends hours in a coffee house recording the many times he has come close to dying, and throughout “I thought a good bit about Lisa Kim’s death and my own.” Love and death meet in Lisa Kim. “I’ve become hopelessly entangled in the life of a dead woman I’ve never met.”What binds the different plots together is storytelling. Peter is a creative writing teacher in a wealthy Chicago high school and the whole novel can be seen as a writing exercise for his students. He shows them how to meld together truth and fiction. and they engage him in lively debates. He shows them the power of storytelling and usually distracted teenage students drop whatever they usually do during class to listen, even though he tells them repeatedly that it’s just something he made up this moment.Gabrielle Robinson