Born in Sydney's western suburbs in the late 1950s, the young Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid places where she believes history and culture are made. Penfriends from the Middle East, France and America offer her the window she craves on life beyond Australia's isolated backyard. With the aid of their letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests and the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz.

Twenty years later and worlds away from her sheltered girlhood, Brooks is an award-winning foreign correspondent covering war and famine. Still intrigued by the foreign correspondents of her adolescence, she embarks on a human treasure hunt in Israel, France and the US to find them. Brooks discovers men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness.

Foreign Correspondence is an intimate, moving and often humorous memoir of growing up in Australia in the 1960s that speaks directly to the heart of everyone who ever yearned to become a citizen of the world.