These compelling, moving stories dramatize the dilemmas of people who have stayed away from home too long, probing the question of how to act and interact in a world of incessantly shifting cultural boundaries.

North of Tourism is about travellers who have broken free of boundaries, crossing the line from tourism to committed participation in societies in which they remain outsiders: an adventurous elderly Frenchwoman in Brazil, a dangerously solitary young human-rights worker in Guatemala, expatriates in Spain, uprooted Canadian in England, a Toronto family splintered by its move to rural Ontario, Westerners adrift in the former Soviet Union and in the closing novella, a diplomat from Luxembourg struggling to salvage meaning from his scandal-shattered life as the First World War engulfs Montenegro and Serbia-all ride the tides of a world where all nations appear alluringly open, yet each continues to enforce the codes of its own history.

Stephen Henighan is the author of four books of fiction, including the novel The Places Where Names Vanish (Thistledown 1998) and the short story collection North of Tourism (Cormorant 1999), which was selected as a `What's New What's Hot` title by chapters.indigo.ca. His short fiction has been published in more than thirty journals and anthologies in Canada, Great Britain and the United States, and has been taught in university courses in Canada, the U.S. and France.

Henighan's literary journalism has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and many other publications. He has published scholarly articles on literature in major international journals such as The Modern Language Review, Comparative Literature Studies and the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies.

Lecturer in Spanish at University College, Oxford and Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, Stephen Henighan has also taught English as a Second Language in Colombia and Moldova, and Creative Writing at Concordia University, the Maritime Writers` Workshop and the University of Guelph. He currently teaches Spanish-American literature and culture in the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Guelph.

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