For the first time the complete works of the award-winning author Elizabeth Gilbert are collected together, highlighting her talents as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. In the international best-seller Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert narrates her struggles after a bitter divorce and turbulent love affair, beginning her quest to rediscover how to be happy. In Rome, she indulges herself and gains nearly two stone. In India, she finds enlightenment through scrubbing temple floors. Finally, in Bali a toothless medicine man reveals a new path to peace, leaving her ready to find love again. In Committed, Gilbert is about to wed the man she fell in love with at the end of Eat, Pray, Love and with wit and intelligence contemplates marriage, trying with all her might to discover what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is.
In The Last American Man, Gilbert presents a fascinating, intimate portrait of the American naturalist and brilliant modern hero Eustace Conway, who at the age of seventeen ditched the comforts of his suburban existence to escape into the wild. Attempting to instil in people a deeper appreciation of nature, Conway stops at nothing in pursuit of bigger, bolder adventures. In Gilbert’s first novel Stern Men, the eighteen-year-old irredeemably unromantic Ruth Thomas returns home from boarding school determined to join the ‘stern-men’. Throwing her education overboard, this feisty and unforgettable American heroine helps work the lobster boats and brushes up on her profanity, eventually falling for a handsome young lobsterman. In Pilgrims, Gilbert’s sharply drawn and tenderly observed collection of twelve short stories, tough heroes and heroines, hardened by their experiences, struggle for their epiphanies and seek companionship as fiercely as they can.
