Madera’s book emphasizes a different kind of narrative pilgrim. Instead of a traveler headed out in search of a story, as Phil Cousineau writes in The Art of Pilgrimage: the journey “as nature’s pattern of regeneration, a journey consisting of departure, arrival, and return,” Madera’s narrators grapple with a perpetual sense of being adrift and often exhausted and burnt by the post-industrial world. These stories are about diasporas, transformations, fragmentations, and layers of meaning.