"Island of the Human Heart" is the Canadian title for "Kite Strings of the Southern Cross", the US title. If you're interested in reading reviews and sample chapters from this book, please click in "Kite Strings of the Southern Cross". It's a fabulous and true travel story of a young woman in Fiji. From her sultry warm nights on the shores of Fiji, she takes us around the world with her tales of hilarious and often harrowing adventures. Not only is it impossible to put down for its stories alone, it's also beautifully and lyrically written. It's the best travel book I've read since Robyn Davidson's "Tracks".

This book has all the great ingredients to keep one turning the pages: exotic travel, humour, and romance. Laurie Gough captures the feel of different countries as she travels the world, while also keeping a great sense of the ridiculous and the sublime.

"Kite Strings of the Southern Cross" is the best travel book I've read in ten years. Some people think just because they've had interesting travels, they can write a book about them, but not only has Gough had incredibly life-changing, fascinating and hilarious travels, she is a superb writer as well. Now I see that her book is shortlisted for the prestigious Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year in the UK. It deserves to win wholeheartedly. Kite Strings has no pretensions. It's one of those books that jogs you out of place: a self-willed young traveler voluntarily abroad in a sometimes hostile world, but one that still somehow manages to ask you to marry it every other month. The most beautiful girl in the world, she is raped by the very image of peace and shocking beauty she seeks at the very beginning and she doesn't stop: she has to see every last inch of the earth, she has to allow it to prove its magnificence and generosity. God, what a fantastic book.

Kite Strings of the Southern Cross is the best book I've read in years! It picks up where traditional travel books (i.e. male) leave off, with potent vignettes about life on the road that capture the sensual side of travel. You'll be transported from sinister Malaysian nightclubs, to the back of a motorcycle with a mad maritimer, to a lush Fijian island you'll never want to leave--all seen through the eyes of a world-class adventuress. I missed the book so much when it finished that I started reading it all over again. I just found a fabulous new travel story by Laurie Gough on salon magzine: http://salon.com/travel/feature/2000/03/11/naxos/index.html

I read all the travel books I can get my hands on, and over the last decade have reviewed many of them for the San Francisco Chronicle. Five days ago I finished Laurie Gough's "Kite Strings of the Southern Cross" and have been mulling it over (it rarely leaves my mind, actually), looking for a weakness. I have concluded that it doesn't have one -- it's pretty darned perfect.

In Fiji, on nights when her Fijian lover is not serenading her under the stars, on the beach, Ms. Gough swaps tales around the local backpackers' campfire -- and most of the best ones are her own. A superb storyteller with an easy writing style, Ms. Gough comes across as an intelligent and intrepid traveler and an endearing personality. She weighs in thoughtfully on all the philosophical and metaphysical questions the road raises, and blends cultural insight, travel lore, and personal introspection seamlessly, veering in mood from serious to lighthearted at exactly the right times.

Hers is simply the best travel book I've read since Jeff Greenwald's "The Size of The World" a few years back, the kind of book you want every traveler you know to read.