Packing Up

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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The fabulous follow-up memoir to the word-of-mouth sensation Diplomatic Baggage
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'Hilarious and hair-raising by turns' - Daily Mail

'Refreshingly candid. Wherever in the world she is writing from, her warmth and her sharp observations won't fail to delight' - Orlando Bird, Financial Times

'Such a pleasure to read' - Sainsbury's Magazine
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Brigid Keenan was a successful young London fashion journalist when she fell in love with a diplomat and left behind the gilt chairs of the Paris salons for a large chicken shed in Nepal. Her bestselling account of life as a 'trailing spouse', Diplomatic Baggage , won the hearts of thousands in countries all over the world.

Now, in her further adventures, we find Brigid in Kazakhstan, where AW, her husband, contracts Lyme disease from a tick, the local delicacy is horse meat sausage and Brigid's visit to a market leads to a full-scale riot from which she requires a police escort. Then, as the prospect retirement looms, Brigid finds herself on the cusp of a whole new world: shuttling between London, Brussels and their last posting in Azerbaijan, navigating her daughters' weddings while coping with a cancer diagnosis, and getting a crash course in grand-motherhood as she helps organise a literature festival in Palestine.

Along the way, dauntless and wildly funny as ever, Brigid learns that packing up doesn't mean packing in as she discovers that retiring and moving back home could just be her biggest challenge yet.
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'With flashes of Nancy Mitford wit ... Brigid Keenan is as skittish as a kitten with needle claws, as stricken as a deer in headlights, and as smart as a cage of monkeys. Brava!' - The Times

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Keenan's (Diplomatic Baggage) follow-up to her first memoir about life as a diplomat's wife is a blend of gentle self-deprecation, confessional asides, and wondrous observations. She presents her stories as a series of journal entries. Topics range from the lighthearted-planning daughter Claudia's wedding, coping with husband AW's snoring, musing over the prospect of becoming a grandmother-to the discovery of a malignant lump in her breast. No matter the topic, Keenan keeps her tone cheery. She indulges in some name-dropping-"I met Annabel Elliot, who is Camilla Parker Bowles' sister"-and, on occasion, sounds a bit spoiled ("she thought I, the one-time fashion and beauty editor of the Sunday Times, was looking for a job at Woolies"). When AW's work takes them to Baku, Azerbaijan, Keenan admits, "I am the luckiest person on earth, why do I feel so anxious?" Though she hardly has room to catalog her life of extensive travels, Keenan notes recent highlights here: a drive through the Azerbaijan countryside, a trip to Holland to give a talk, a literary festival including stops in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and a health spa in Sri Lanka. She closes with the trials of AW's retirement, fearing restlessness after such a cosmopolitan life. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Associates (U.K.). (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

A British memoirist continues the engaging story she began in her best-selling book, Diplomatic Baggage (2005), about her late-midlife experiences as the wife of a career diplomat. When the peripatetic Keenan and her husband, AW, returned to Europe from Kazakhstan, each felt like "a lost sock in the laundromat of life." As AW trekked back and forth between his post in Brussels and the couple's home in London awaiting word on what would be his next, and final, assignment abroad, the author learned that she had breast cancer. Meanwhile, their two grown daughters were entering new phases in their lives as wives and mothers. Between her surgery, planning for one daughter's wedding and awaiting the arrival of another's baby, Keenan felt like "a maypole with [her] ribbons being tugged by [her] family in all directions." But she survived the changes and learned to cherish the grandchildren who had first seemed like "interruptions to normal life." Her husband's new posting to Azerbaijana beautiful but ruined country where "the word for corruption' and gratitude' [were] the same"brought new challenges. There, she coped with the occasional pangs of jealousy over AW's gorgeous young assistants and frequent but amused frustrations with a Russian housekeeper who seemed determined to drive Keenan mad with her bizarre antics. A holiday at a Sri Lankan spa intended to restore peace and health turned into an unintended ordeal that left the author even more frazzled than when she started. Even retirement seemed an adventureuntil she began to realize the implications it had for her and her husband's identities and daily routines. It was then that she realized her life hadn't been so much about seeing the world as about the inner journeys those travels had set her upon. Intimate, funny and keenly observed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.