No Fixed Address: How to Run Away From It All by Eileen Maley, Second Wind Publications, 404 pages, $15.

Any traveler, or prospective traveler, will be entranced by this memoir by Canadian-born Eileen Maley, now quietly settled down for some years in West Tisbury. But where hadn’t she been before that? Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma (now Myanmar), Hong Kong, India, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Greece, Malta, Algeria, Morocco Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands.

In 1971, after attending a retirement party for a co-worker at the Vancouver Sun, she decided there was far too much to see and do in the world to stay at the newspaper. She had been working there as a reporter and editor, and enjoying her work, but booking passage on the SS Iberia and setting off for Australia was much more enticing. Little did she know what sorts of accommodations and meals — on land and on water — lay ahead. Largely on a diet of rice and fish, she would begin to long for the lowly potato. Two of the vessels on which she sailed would later sink with considerable loss of life.

She would be sleeping in backpacker hotel rooms with no doors — where one walked through bedroom after bedroom to reach one’s own bedroom. She would be “sightseeing” in a temple of snakes in Malaysia. But she would also be meeting, traveling with, and eventually marrying West Tisbury man Tim Maley who was a fellow-passenger on the Iberia, bound for Australia where he planned to teach.

On land, they often traveled by train. In India, they took a narrow-gauge railway up a Himalayan mountain to Darjeeling. Sharing their compartment was a leper who could not take his eyes off Tim’s orange until he had it in his own mouth, where it vanished in a single gulp. But there came a time when her travels would end and she would return to her family in Canada. But not for long. The United States (and Tim) were to lure her to the Vineyard.

The last part of her book deals with life in West Tisbury, including building the Field Gallery with Tim’s father, the late Tom Maley, and architect Robert Schwartz, buying a house on Music street, getting married in a dress made from silk she had bought in Thailand.

No Fixed Address is, as they say nowadays, a compelling read.

Eileen Maley will give a talk about her book on Thursday, Nov. 4 beginning at 4:30 p.m. at the West Tisbury Library