For much of the 1980s, I worked at a travel agency in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The travel benefits back then were amazing. Like most of my hippie-ish colleagues, I’d return from one trip and immediately plan the next. I was on a tour of Egypt (ten days for $300!) when I acknowledged I liked the idea of travel more than the reality. I was reading Flaubert’s letters to his mother from Egypt, and his descriptions seemed more real than the landscape in front of me. I still like getting on airplanes, but traveling through literature is the cheaper and, for me, more broadening experience.
The Easy Way Out was my second novel. It was originally published in 1992 but was released in audiobook format for the first time in May of 2023. The narrator, Patrick, gets pulled into the romantic travails of his younger brother who is engaged to one woman but in love with another. It’s Patrick’s way of avoiding his own relationship problems. To complicate matters, his unhappy parents are insisting upon the doomed marriage. Patrick is a travel agent who hates to travel, which was my situation when I began writing it. In many ways, this is my most autobiographical novel. Not something I’m proud of given the messy family dynamics. The novel was made into a wonderful French film in 2015 called L’Art de la Fugue.
Any list of books for armchair travelers should begin with this wonderful novel.
Macon writes books for business travelers who want to pretend they never left the safety and security of home. At its heart, this is a love story between fussy, introverted Macon and the world’s chattiest and most chaotic dog trainer, Muriel.
Along the way, we meet Macon’s dysfunctional family—they organize their canned food alphabetically—Muriel’s wounded son, and one of the great animal characters in American fiction. Laughter, tears, and no air rage; what more could you ask from a novel?
It’s Anne Tyler at her quirky, poignant best and my favorite of her many books. It helped me understand the feelings I wanted to create for my readers.
Discover a beautiful story of what it is to be human from Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling Anne Tyler
How does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the chaos of everyday life?
With the loss of his son, the departure of his wife and the arrival of Muriel, a dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic, Macon's attempts at ordinary life are tragically and comically undone.
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 1 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE**
This long, beautifully written novel about four sisters in pre-WWII Japan is so immersive and engaging, I felt throughout as if I’d been transported to another world.
In fact, the world it describes—Japan caught between tradition and the encroaching social and political changes of modernity—no longer exists. However, the romantic complications and the emotional struggles and squabbles of the Makioka family all ring true and remain relevant to any reader.
It’s episodic (it was originally published in installments) but coheres into a lush reading experience that I hated to leave behind and found impossible to forget. Despite the drama—and there’s a lot of it—there’s something calming about the book, like a long ocean voyage on (mostly) calm seas.
Tanizaki's masterpiece is the story of four sisters, and the declining fortunes of a traditional Japanese family. It is a loving and nostalgic recreation of the sumptuous, intricate upper-class life of Osaka immediately before World War Two. With surgical precision, Tanizaki lays bare the sinews of pride, and brings a vanished era to vibrant life.
Peter Cameron is one the most stylish and original writers working today.
This novel from 1997 is a vivid, haunting journey to an imaginary version of Andorra. I’m tempted to say that the whole arc of the story is an armchair voyage, but to elaborate would give away the ending, which is one of the more thrilling, shocking, and satisfying final pages I know. I sometimes reread the book to see how Cameron pulled it off.
The narrator, who says he’s in Andorra after a tragic event, moves into the Hotel Excelsior, a setting that becomes a character. The entire novel has the disorienting immediacy of a fever dream and an undercurrent of ambisexual tension and sensuality, all served up with Cameron’s incisive wit.
At the start of this novel, a man arrives in the tiny, mysterious nation of Andorra, having left behind his life in America after a terrible tragedy. The world he finds in La Plata, the capital city, is beautiful, enchanted, and somehow not quite real. As he meets the city's inhabitants - the ancient Mrs. Reinhardt, who outlives her lifetime lease on the penthouse in the city's grand hotel; Sophonsobia Quay, the kayaking matriarch of an Andorran dynasty; and the Dents, an Australian couple who share a first name, a gigantic dog, and a volatile secret - the mystery of…
It’s unusual to read a novel that doesn’t feel like anything else you’ve ever read, but Nancy Lemann’s voice is so original and arresting, this book stands alone among reading experiences for me.
It’s a love story between Louise and her wealthy wastrel paramour, Claude Collier, all set against the backdrop of humid, overgrown New Orleans. Lemann’s sentences are so atmospheric, I felt drugged by them.
Even now, I have a hard time distinguishing my memories of having been to New Orleans from the descriptions of it in the novel. I reread it every year or two, not for the story—which I know by heart—but for the feelings it induces.
Did I mention it’s super short and one of the most hilarious novels I’ve ever read?
Claude Collier made the world seem kind,"" says Louise Brown, -beginning a tale of Violent Love, Breakdowns, Moods, and Felonious Drunkenness that floats from one lush, green, sweltering New Orleans evening to another. Returning home after four years of college in New England (""Among the Yankees I have known,"" she says, ""I only met one who had the grace to apologize to me about the War""), Louise bemusedly finds herself reimmersed in New Orleans society's ""wastrel-youth contingent."" At the center of this gin-fueled hurricane is Claude, rumpled, accident prone, supremely sweet, and desperate. For Claude, Louise is his steadying focus;…
I first read The Sheltering Sky on a train to New York. I was so caught up in the book, I hated to get off at Penn Station.
It feels as if the novel sprang directly from the author’s subconscious, and it has an eerie way of burrowing into the reader’s thoughts and dreams. An American couple (modeled on Bowles and his wife Jane) embark on a journey deep into the North African desert. To say they have a complicated marriage is an understatement.
The murky sexuality of the characters, the astonishing descriptions of the landscape and the sky, and the truly shocking events make this a journey no reader can ever forget, even if you’d like to.
'The Sheltering Sky is a book about people on the edge of an alien space; somewhere where, curiously, they are never alone' Michael Hoffman.
Port and Kit Moresbury, a sophisticated American couple, are finding it more than a little difficult to live with each other. Endeavouring to escape this predicament, they set off for North Africa intending to travel through Algeria - uncertain of exactly where they are heading, but determined to leave the modern world behind. The results of this casually taken decision are both tragic and compelling.
Cleo Cooper, a cross-cultural psychology professor, is living the dream on the Big Island of Hawaii. With ocean-dipping weekends, she enjoys her dog, her job, and her boyfriend Ben - until the day she’s on a research vessel and a dead body is caught in the dragline.
The police determine it is murder and set their sights on a gentle former student, Kai. It doesn’t take much urging from Kai’s auntie for Cleo to investigate. But Ben grows distant, and Cleo’s dog grows ill. A couple of accidental deaths later, and someone makes an attempt on her life.
What happened to Cleo’s life in paradise? Can she discover the true killer? Can she stop the killer before the killer stops her?
Paradise is shaken when the body of a young woman is dragged onto a university research vessel during a class outing in Hilo Bay. Cleo Cooper is shaken when she finds her favorite student is on the hook for the murder. Danger lurks on land and sea as Cleo and her friends are enticed to search for the true killer. In between paddling, swimming, and arguing with her boyfriend, Cleo discovers all is not what it seems on the Big Island of Hawaii. But will she figure out the truth before she becomes the next victim?
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