My new book!

I’m a business writer, so I usually stick to business on LinkedIn, but I wanted to tell you about a side project of mine that I’ve just published, a travelogue about a 1500km trek I made with my wife and three teenage daughters across France and Spain on the Camino de Santiago.  

Half memoir, half history, Onward, Backward! -or- A Ramble to Santiago, recounts our family adventure as well as the outrageous, often funny, and sometimes shocking stories of the people who have lived near that old pilgrimage trail for the last half-million years.

Between research, writing, and drawing, Onward, Backward! took me about five years to put together, so I’m pleased to report that people seem to be enjoying it:

If you've got to take your wife and three daughters on a 1,000-mile, seven-week death march--sorry, "family adventure"--across Europe, it helps if you're Ben Voyles: steeped in European history, transparent about the complexities of family dynamics, and burst-out-loud funny as a writer. I'm still not sure I would have traded places with him that summer--my feet ached just reading about the journey--but I'm so grateful that he wrote about the trip. I'll remember it as long as he does.

David Pogue

New York Times columnist

Emmy award-winning CBS News Sunday Morning correspondent

Frequent NOVA host

Imagine the challenges, logistical and otherwise, of undertaking a 1500 km family pilgrimage (with not all family members necessarily 100% on board) and you'll get a sense of the fun in reading Onward, Backward! - alternately comic, heroic, and wry, with the daily progress marked by surprising explorations of local histories and cultural curiosities of the Camino route itself.  

John McQuaid

Science and environment journalist

Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner

Author of Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat

"Onward, Backward! A Ramble to Santiago" by Bennett Voyles is an extraordinary story about an extraordinary family - Voyles and his wife and three daughters trek 1,000 miles across France and Spain. The plot is dramatic on its own, as the family overcomes physical and emotional obstacles with enough drama to satisfy any reader - but the book is also a fascinating historical saga. Along their route we meet delightful characters, some in the current day, others from centuries ago.

Voyles' wit and keen eye are reminiscent of the delightful PBS series, "The Durrells in Corfu" based on the wonderful writings of Gerald Durrell - both are madcap, poignant and wise. 

Voyles and his family may not have taken the pilgrimage for religious reasons, but this reader found it to be divinely uplifting.

Patty Dann

Author of Mermaids and most recently, The Wright Sister 

Wonderfully engaging, filled with information, wit, beautiful writing, and tenderness. Don't miss it!

Sheila Kohler

Author of Open Secrets and nine other novels, two-time winner of the O. Henry Short Story Prize

This is an engaging, entertaining, and historically well-informed account of one international family's adventures along the Camino de Santiago, the famous pilgrim's trail that leads from central France to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. Blisters, bicycles, and breakdowns, both mechanical and personal; graceful prose, good humor and a gentle appreciation for the foibles, irritations, and joys of family life on the road: they are all here. It is the story of a journey, told with sympathy and understanding, but with a clear-eyed realism about the difficulties along the way. I found it a highly rewarding reading experience.

Robert Stacey

Professor of Medieval History

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

University of Washington

Onward, Backward! is a highly enjoyable read -- a lively mix of family adventure and historical travelogue. Voyles writes with warmth and humor and is a sure-footed guide to the colorful history of the Camino de Santiago. It's a part of Europe I'll never visit again without thinking of medieval pilgrims, mad monks and the obsessive hikers who are still retracing those early journeys. Highly recommended.

Don Durfee

Managing Editor for News Strategy & Operations

Reuters News

A poignant, funny, charming family adventure -- think Laurie Lee with reluctant teenagers -- that will make you ache to walk the Camino de Santiago the second lockdown ends.

Julia Hobsbawm, OBE

Author of the best-selling and award-winning book

The Simplicity Principle

Three hundred thousand people walk the Camino de Santiago each year. You may not ever be one of them. But through Bennett Voyles' engaging and disarming memoir/travelogue, you can journey across 1,500 kilometers of France and Spain, and through half a million years of history, in the company of the author, his intrepid wife and his three reluctantly-along-for-the-trek adolescent daughters. Voyles' irrepressible curiosity enlivens the text with digressions into everything from Roman mythology to New Wave film to the Visigothic alphabet, and his whimsical pencil drawings give the book a homespun feel. Onward, Backward! reminds us that, no matter our age or perspective or path, we're all pilgrims, journeying alone and together for a time that is all too brief. 

Anndee Hochman

Author of Everyday Acts and Small Subversions and

Anatomies: A Novella and Stories

Columnist, The Philadelphia Inquirer

I read Onward Backward! with much joy and laughter. 

Bennett Voyles' travel memoir Onward, Backward! joins the other great memoirs of the Camino de Santiago oeuvre, but from an entirely different point of view: with his wife and his three daughters in tow. They travel by both foot and by bike all the way from Le Puy en Velay in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Like all good Camino journeys, Voyles starts his with the crazy idea that he and his wife Cybèle had to take their girls on this epic journey. The only thing is that this "epic journey" happens to coincide when they are all teenagers -- and Parisian teenagers at that!

I also loved all his descriptions of the history along the route. For me as a professional guide, his book will be invaluable, and for any person considering walking or biking the Camino it is a must- read, a great introduction to the reality of the Chemin/Camino/path - which is always equal parts joy, hurt feet, smelly pilgrims, great encounters with locals and good and bad food - and an arrival in Santiago with a happy heart. 

A highly recommended read for anyone considering the Camino -- or any other grand adventure -- with their kids.

Sally Bentley

Producer, "Walking the Camino; Six Ways to Santiago,"

Winner of five film festival awards for Best Documentary

Camino Guide with Spanish Steps Tours of Asturias, Spain 

Bennett Voyles is an engaging, quirky storyteller and a fantastic wrangler of teenagers in this formidable, enviable tale of a long family journey through France and Spain. When we're all looking back on our lives decades from now, we'll wish we had created such memories for our families. What an accomplishment, in living through it so successfully, and writing about it so well!

Tina Kelley 

Author of Rise Wildly, Abloom & Awry, Precise and

 The Gospel of Galore, and 

co-author of Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope

A lifelong fan of long walks and travel memoirs, I knew I had to read Onward, Backward! as soon as I saw that enthusiastic, gently comic title. The book captivated me from first page to last. Here is an unexpected pilgrim who knows how to make everything from obscure French history to the threat of punaises (bed bugs) entertaining. Making the book even more engaging is the presence and occasional journal entries of the author's wife and three reluctant teenage daughters, who complain about the forced march while still clearly enjoying the family adventure. The parents of this "heathen family" are on the verge of having their first daughter leave the nest, adding a poignance to the group undertaking.

Perhaps my favorite part of the memoir, though, is Voyles's line drawings of incidental sights along the Camino de Santiago.

I read this hefty book in a weekend and actually felt regretful when the 1,500 km trip came to an end. Highly recommended.

Elizabeth Judd

Writer and book critic

I relished every word, every drawing, every footnote. The writing is fluid and easy and perfectly balanced between Voyles's account of his family's day-to-day experiences on the Camino and digressions into anything that piques his curiosity: monks and nuns and saints and sinners, kings and queens, farmers and dogs, lions and chickens, religious wars, religious tolerance, ancient history, current politics, agriculture, road-building techniques, Spanish food, Basque proverbs, etc. etc. etc. Voyles is both extremely erudite and also humble enough to do a prodigious amount of research: the bibliography is 18 pages long! The book packs in at 430 pages, but my interest never flagged.

Sally Tittman

Artist

Available now on Amazon, in Kindle and paperback:

https://amzn.to/3bchG7t