How To Travel Without Leaving Your Couch
It’s the season for snowdrops peeking up from winter soil – harbingers of warmer weather to come.
My family loves to pin down the year’s travel plans around now – purchasing plane tickets and making hotel bookings. In April, my husband and daughter will visit family in Belgrade, Serbia while I stay home for a writers retreat in the comfort of my own study with all my inspirational books just a few steps away. In July we’ll cross the mountains to visit loved ones in Missoula, Montana. In October, I’m excited that I’ll visit my favorite place in the world, Myanmar. Assuming the conflict dies down, of course.
In the meantime, I love a well-written story that takes me to a fascinating place without leaving the comfort of my cozy couch. Here are three of my favorite books that will transport you. Happy reading! Message me your favorite books set in international locales…
An NPR, Boston Globe, and San Francisco Chronicle best book of the year, The Hired Man is an incisive, powerful novel of a small Croatian town and its dark wartime secrets, unwittingly brought into the light by a family of outsiders. A masterpiece of storytelling haunted by lost love and a restrained menace, the Hired Man confirms Aminatta Forna as one of our most important writers.
Hunters in the Dark is a sophisticated game of cat and mouse redolent of the nightmares of Patricia Highsmith, where identities are blurred, greed trumps kindness, and karma is ruthless. Filled with Hitchcockian twists and turns, suffused with the steamy heat and pervasive superstition of the Cambodian jungle, and unafraid to confront difficult questions about the machinations of fate, this is a masterful novel that confirms Lawrence Osborne’s reputation as one of our finest contemporary writers.
Ariel Pryce wakes up in Lisbon alone. Her husband is gone―no warning, no note, not answering his phone. Something is wrong.
She starts with hotel security, then the police, then the American embassy, each time confronting questions she can’t fully answer: What exactly is John doing in Lisbon? Bestselling author Chris Pavone delivers sparkling prose and razor-sharp insights in this stunning and sophisticated thriller. Two Nights in Lisbon will stick with you long after the surprising final page.
