Terry Tempest Williams has pieced together another literary masterpiece with her latest work, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Her story begins with an answered prayer: Off the coast of Maine, she asks the sea to give her “one wild word” and the word it returns to her is “mosaic.”

Questioning, yet trusting the answer, she travels to Ravenna, Italy, to learn the art of mosaic and discovers a new way of seeing and writing about the world. Her journey continues on to Utah, where she studies endangered prairie dogs, and then to Rwanda, a nation shattered by genocide. Throughout these adventures, her philosophical musings on this word reveal to her how, like a mosaic, beautiful conversation can emerge among the most deeply fragmented environments.