In his late 20s the American writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus escaped to Berlin. After a period spent in thrall to the city's "experiment in total freedom from authority", he started to long for purpose, and his chance came when he agreed to walk the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. This is the first in the trio of pilgrimages chronicled in A Sense of Direction, his first book. The next stop is Shikoku, a Japanese island, where Lewis-Kraus visits 88 temples and mostly survives on rice balls. Finally, he travels with his father and younger brother to spend Jewish new year at Uman in Ukraine, where ultra-orthodox Jews congregate at the tomb of an 18th-century rabbi.

Lewis-Kraus's fraught relationship with his father, a rabbi who came out to him when he was 19 and left his mother for a man, is at the heart of the book. The emotional exchanges between the two are touching, complex and often understated. Elsewhere, the book abounds in sharply drawn, occasionally hilarious studies of Lewis-Kraus's companions, who tend not to be local: like the travel writing of Geoff Dyer, with whom Lewis-Kraus shares an erudite crankiness, this could be called "tourism literature". Inevitably, he learns a series of "trite but vital life lessons" along the way, and if these are occasionally overstated, they are recounted with a winning blend of earnestness, wit and high-octane intellect.