A Day's Tour: A Journey Through France and Belgium by Calais, Tournay, Orchies, Douai, Arras, Béthune, Lille, Comines, Ypres, Hazebrouck, Berg

On a sweltering August day in London, a restless traveler impulsively boards a train for the Channel, driven by nothing more specific than the need to be elsewhere. What follows is a gloriously aimless ramble through the towns of Northern France and Belgium: Tournay, Orchies, Douai, Arras, Lille, and eventually into the hop fields around Ypres and Hazebrouck. This is travel writing before tourism existed as we know it, when a stranger wandering through provincial streets was still a novelty worth recording. Fitzgerald possesses that invaluable Victorian gift for noticing everything - the particular quality of light in a café, the character of a carriage driver, the strange pleasure of crossing into a foreign country by daylight. There's no grand purpose here, no itinerary, no redemption arc. Just the quiet joy of movement and the particular charm of happening upon towns that most readers will never visit. For anyone who has ever felt the sudden, irrational urge to just get on a train and see what happens.