Without Reservations is about a woman's dream come true - taking a year off to travel the world and rediscover what it is like to be an independent woman, without ties and without reservations.

Without Reservations is about a woman's dream come true - taking a year off to travel the world and rediscover what it is like to be an independent woman, without ties and without reservations.

'In many ways, I was an independent woman,' writes Alice Steinbach, single working mother and Pulitzer prize-winnning journalist. 'For years I'd made my own choices, paid my own bills, shovelled my own snow, and had relationships that allowed for a lot of freedom on both sides.'

Slowly, however, she saw that she had become quite dependent in another way. 'I had fallen into the habit - of defining myself in terms of who I was to other people and what they expected of me.' Who am I, she wanted to know, away from the things that define me - my family, children, job, friends? Steinbach searches for the answer in some of the most exciting places in the world- Paris, where she finds a soulmate in a Japanese man; Oxford, where she learns more from a ballroom dancing lesson than any of her studies; Milan, where she befriends a young woman about to be married.

Beautifully illustrated with postcards Steinbach wrote home to herself, this is an unforgettable voyage of discovery.