There is a kind of hunger that no amount of arriving will satisfy.

You know the feeling. You are in one life and something in you keeps insisting the right one is somewhere else. You have left things behind and loved the leaving and carried the cost of it ever since, quietly, without ever quite being able to explain yourself to the people who stayed.

In 1325 a twenty-one-year-old Moroccan scholar named Ibn Battuta climbed onto a donkey outside his father's house and headed east, crying. He meant to reach Mecca and come home within the year. He kept going for twenty-nine years, crossed roughly seventy-five thousand miles and four continents, served a sultan who executed men for a sentence, governed a chain of coral islands, watched a fleet carrying everything he owned sink off the coast of India, and walked through the Black Death in Damascus. He came back to Tangier to find that his mother had died six months earlier, still waiting.

This is a narrative biography, told close to the bone. Not a catalogue of wonders, though the wonders are here. It is the story of what the road gave a man who could not stay, what it cost the people who loved him, and what he made of the reckoning when the walking finally stopped.

• Recognise the pull you have always felt and stop apologising for it
• Find the fourteenth century as a living, breathing, argued-over world rather than a set of dates
• Sit with the real price of an extraordinary life, paid by people who never chose it
• Understand what it means to pay attention to the world the way he did
• Come to the end forgiven for every road you took and every door you closed behind you

This is a book for anyone who has ever heard the road calling and had to decide.

He could not stay. He went everywhere. He left us the world.

Open the first page. The rest will find you.