Around the World in 80 Dates

Jennifer Cox's lovely book on her worldwide search for a Soul Mate

Mar 21, 2007 Mike Gerrard

Jennifer Cox's travel book tells of her journey round the world to find the Soul Mate she knows exists somewhere. Can the devoted career woman still find Mister Right?

Jennifer Cox was working in London for the travel guidebook publishers Lonely Planet, and like many career men and women these days she was dedicated to her job. Her job was her life, and she was beginning to think she would never find her Mr Right within the small circle of people that she knew. She believed in a Soul Mate for everyone – but where was hers? She quit her job and set off to find him, by going Around the World in 80 Dates.

Jennifer Cox's twist on the Jules Verne classic, Around the World in 80 Days, sees her recruiting her large worldwide network of friends, and turning them into Date-Wranglers. She sends them her idea of the perfect man, and asks them to round up any likely candidates. The friends recruit friends, and the hunt is on. Where is Jennifer's Soul Mate?

There then follows a frantic time in organising both the travel and the dates, as she starts in Europe, moves on to the USA and finally heads for Australia via the Far East. It's a hilarious and breathless tale, and as this new paperback edition comes out, it's accompanied by the news that Around the World in 80 Dates has now been sold to Hollywood. It will make a terrific movie.

Some of the early dates have the almost inevitable air of disaster about them, something that will be appreciated by anyone who has ever had a friend fix them up with 'the perfect date', only to find yourself meeting someone you hate and have nothing in common with. But Around the World in 80 Dates is entertainingly written, and even the disasters are hilarious.

Around the World in 80 Dates veers from comic to tragic, and sometimes both at the same time. For example, when Jennifer Cox goes to Verona and dresses up as Juliet to meet her date, who pretends to be Romeo for visiting tourists, she's soon talking to a man whose Soul Mate is dead and buried. He fell in love with a woman who died long before he was born, convinced that he knew what she was like, and they communicated, and she was the perfect woman for him. It's touching and funny and sad and bizarre, all at the same time, and the author does well simply to listen as he tells his story.

One of the funniest scenes is not with a human encounter, but with HAL, the computer which controls the heating, lighting and other features in the Seattle home of Date Number 55. Cox's battle with HAL had me laughing out loud. She meets gamblers in Vegas and mimes on the Ramblas in Barcelona – here her man proves to be uncommunicative, an admirable quality in a mime but not in a date, Cox observes.

Does Jennifer Cox succeed in her quest for a Soul Mate, as she goes Around the World in 80 Dates? My lips are sealed. You just have to read the book to find out.

The new paperback edition of Around the World in 80 Dates is published in the UK by Arrow at £7.99

The copyright of the article Around the World in 80 Dates in U.K./Ireland Travel is owned by Mike Gerrard. Permission to republish Around the World in 80 Dates in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.