My Travel Books
Now for something a little lighter!
Alongside the shy girl books, I write travel memoirs — and they’re a different creature altogether. Think light, fun, honest: a mid-life woman starting over, one country at a time, and discovering rather a lot about herself along the way.
These particular adventures began by accident. I sold my house in England at the end of 2019, set off with no real plan, and the world promptly shut its borders — leaving me to make a life in a series of places I’d never expected to land in. So I wrote about them. One country, one book at a time.
Starting with:
The Balkans Trilogy
Three small countries, three very different adventures — and me, your heroine, working out her new life, and her new self one step at a time.
Montenegro the Beautiful
I never meant to reinvent my life. I just liked the sound of “Montenegro.”
What was meant to be a three-night stay turned into five months that changed everything.
Fresh from selling my home in England on nothing but intuition, I arrived in this small Balkan country days before the world shut its borders. Two nights in, my father died. I mourned him fully — and then, just as quickly, found my footing again, choosing to honour him by stepping forward into the strange new life in front of me, rather than staying stuck in the loss.
What I found, instead of solitude, was family. Jelena and Dara, the women whose home I was renting, folded me into their lives: morning coffee on the lawn, secondhand clothes when mine didn’t suit the heat, a fire lit for me every night because I couldn’t quite trust myself to build one without it getting out of control.
This is a story about what happens when your plans collapse and somehow, impossibly, life gets better. Funny, unflinching, and more honest than most memoirs dare.
The first book in The Balkans Trilogy.
“The story flows very well and I wanted to keep turning each page.” — Amazon review
“None of the narcissism of Eat, Pray, Love… the author makes every effort to endear herself to the locals and adapt to the local culture.” — Amazon review.
Albania the Crazy
I never wanted to visit Albania. But my ninety days in Montenegro were almost up, the rules there were tightening by the week, and next door, Albania was wide open.
I crossed the border without much of a plan — and was wrong about almost everything I’d assumed.
What followed was ninety days of relentless, glorious, exhausting chaos: noise that never stopped, apartments that looked perfect in photos and weren’t, taxi drivers who didn’t know the way and drove anyway, construction crews rebuilding entire seaside towns mid-pandemic. Every time I thought I’d found stillness, Albania found a new way to take it back.
And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, something unexpected happened. I stopped reacting. I found a strange, stubborn calm in the exact place I least expected it — even as the chaos kept escalating around me.
Louder, messier and funnier than Montenegro the Beautiful, but built from the same honest, unfiltered place. It ends, fittingly, with a border guard, a missing stamp, and a Montenegrin taxi driver asking for my number thirty seconds after I crossed back to safety.
The second book in The Balkans Trilogy.
“Raw, hilarious, and completely chaotic — and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.” — Amazon review
“There are very few travelogues about Albania… a very well written, interesting book.” — Amazon review
Croatia the Cosmopolitan – Coming Soon!
The third and final stop on the Balkans journey. I’m writing it now — so watch this space, or join my newsletter and I’ll let you know the moment it’s out.
And beyond the Balkans…
The wandering didn’t stop at three countries. A South Asian trilogy is on its way — drawn from earlier travels through some genuinely wild and little-written-about corners of the world.
Think Tibet, Pakistan and the Karakoram Highway, Bangladesh!
As well as more commonly travelled India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
A beautiful and sometimes chaotic part of the world – or maybe chaos just follows me?
More about ALL of this very soon!
Fiona Cutts 