This is quite a departure from Fiona Sussman’s last novel, the excellent The Last Time We Spoke, which explored the aftermath of a brutal home invasion and won the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel.

Addressed to Greta is a feel-good tale of adventure and self-empowerment which finds Sussman tackling a lighter theme, clearly drawing on her own global adventures. It’s a bequest from a dead friend – the enigmatic Walter, a gay gardener who formed a bond with the taciturn Greta before dying of cancer – that gets Greta out of her self-imposed limbo and into the world.

In many ways, thirty-something stuck-in-a-rut Greta is an unlikely protagonist as a woman so reserved that she delays visiting her hairdresser for fear of the stilted conversation that will inevitably ensue. She has worked an office job at a pool chemical company for years, her life a dull, safe routine. Her late mother has left her mark too. Her mantra “No expectation, no disappointment” just one example of the legacy of negativity Greta has inherited.

If outwardly her life is proceeding okay, inwardly Greta is starting to crumble. She is starting to see there is “no link between her aspirations and ambitions, and the tarmac of life as it unfolded”; her life is comfortable but joyless – she never takes time off work, writes Christmas cards in September and renews her car rego a month before it’s due.

And then she gets a call from a lawyer informing her of the once-in-a-lifetime adventure Walter has in store for her. And quite a trip it is – from New York to London and then Rwanda – and, like Eat, Pray, Love, the sort of global self-empowerment travelogue that screams for a big-budget screen adaptation.

Although Walter only knew Greta for two years, he understood Greta better than she did herself; his peripatetic itinerary designed to infuse her dowdy spirit with a little magic. Much of the narrative energy of the novel comes from the people she meets and places she visits and the verve with which Sussman captures the various locales. That includes staying at The Carlyle in New York, attending food classes in London and watching gorillas in Rwanda.

If Sussman sometimes plays up Greta’s naivety too broadly – the first-time-on-a-plane episode when she takes boiled eggs to eat in business class, or the cultural gaffs and assumptions she makes – she remains an endearing character. Her journey will unlock family secrets and open the door to a new way of looking at and experiencing life.

Throughout Sussman captures the uncertain joys of long-haul travel – the unexpected characters, the forced intimacy of tour groups, the glimpses into a stranger’s life over a hotel breakfast; the sense that our shared story is “… just one pixel on a vast canvas”.

The result is a perfect beach read for stuck-at-home travellers.

Reviewed by Greg Fleming