This is by far the best written book I have ever read. The Dream of a Thousand Lives chronicles the year Connelly spends as an exchange student in Asia. Tired of "the marvels of Calgary," Connelly sets off to Thailand with curiosity and a briefcase full of licorice and loose-leaf. As Connelly explains, the ants devoured the licorice in the first week, but the paper survived.

Connelly never resorts to decorative travel writing, but sticks to a witty and unfailingly honest account of her time in Thailand. The book, (originally titled "Touch the Dragon" in Canada) consists of a chronological collection of the author's journal entries, detailing her time in Denchai (living at a the Thai Liquor Store owned by her first host family) to her travels to Bangkok and Chang Mai.

Connelly possesses a rare ability to convey the strange labyrinth of lives and experiences she encounters in the small farming Village of Denchai into a lyrical fluid narrative. This is a book that you will not be able to put down.

Superb book. I couldn't put it down - bought it yesterday & read until I fell asleep then finished this morning. I felt as though I was there, travelling with her. She has a great sense of humor that is splashed throughout the book. I truly had a sense of how she felt on her year long visit there. I'm so glad she shared her memories.

Karen Connelly is one of the few writers who I wait to read. Each new book of hers is filled with a beautiful instability of place and people. "The Disorder of Love" is a wonderfully exotic book filled with poems on the chaotic nature which exists in all our relationships and especially those which are romantic.

Connelly is the youngest Canadian to hold the honour of the Governor Generals award. Hers was for the non-fiction work, "Touch the Dragon." She followed this non-fiction work with another entitled, "One Room in a Castle: Letters from France, Spain and Greece." Both these books, though not poetry, contain a tone of poetry in every line. Every detail is made exotic and new despite how ordinary it may be.

"The Disorder of Love" is Connelly's third collection of poems and by far not only the most ambitious but the most mature. The back sleeve maintains that not since Elizabeth Smart have we read a book about love which is so raw and I, of course, heartily agree. Connelly's newest volume of poetry is as ripped, ravaged, torn open and exposed to the bone as Smart's, "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept."

Connelly is able to transport the reader to her world of foreign tongue; the exotic of a scorpion found sleeping across her notebook; the worn, pale slip of ourselves when we've been left by a lover who shouts that he does not love well; the soft beat of the moth in the tea kettle, and the loneliness in an Amazon rain forest.

This is a book which will comfort and sustain you.