Desperate with homesickness she haunted the New York public library, studying the atlas to establish the most direct route home. She may not have had good English but she did understand the hieroglyphics of cartography. In the spring of 1927, aided only by a hand-drawn route map, she set her face toward Siberia and started to walk . . . From the moment Cassandra Pybus heard about Lillian Alling, the woman who walked to Russia, the story sank hooks into her imagination. She too haunted the New York Library and archives looking for clues about this enigmatic pedestrian. When her historical sleuthing yielded little, Cassandra set out on her own epic trek to follow Lillian's route through the wilderness of north-western Canada and subarctic Alaska to Siberia. In this delightfully frank and funny account, travel and adventure mingle with history and autobiography as Cassandra Pybus travels through an astonishing landscape embedded with tales of folly and courage, eating disorders and obsession at high latitude.