Books with category Travel Adventures
Displaying 12 books

The Pairing

2024

by Casey McQuiston

Two bisexual exes accidentally book the same European food and wine tour and challenge each other to a hookup competition to prove they're over each other—except they're definitely not.


Theo and Kit have been a lot of things: childhood best friends, crushes, in love, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on the transatlantic flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other's lives once and for all.


Time apart has done them good. Theo has found confidence as a hustling bartender by night and aspiring sommelier by day, with a long roster of casual lovers. Kit, who never returned to America, graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school class and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. Sure, nothing really compares to what they had, and life stretches out long and lonely ahead of them, but—yeah. It's in the past.


All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour that never happened, good for 48 months after its original date and about to expire. Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip. Solo. Separately.


It's not until they board the tour bus that they discover they've both accidentally had the exact same idea, and now they're trapped with each other for three weeks of stunning views, luscious flavors, and the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy. It's fine. There's nothing left between them. So much nothing that, when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is totally game. And why stop there? Why not a full-on European hookup competition?


But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have.

The English Understand Wool

2022

by Helen DeWitt

Maman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.


Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests.


One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?

All Those Things We Never Said

2017

by Marc Levy

A romantic comedy set in a world that is larger than life...

As far back as Julia Walsh could remember, she always had a difficult relationship with her father. They hardly ever saw each other, hardly ever spoke, and on the rare occasions they did, they never seemed to agree on anything.

Three days before her wedding, Julia receives a phone call from her father's personal secretary. Just as Julia had predicted, Anthony Walsh will not be able to attend his daughter's wedding. However, for once, Julia has to admit that her father's excuse is irreproachable. He's dead.

Julia cannot help seeing the tragic-comical side of the situation. From one second to the next, her nuptial dreams transform into funeral plans. Even beyond the grave, it seems, Anthony Walsh has his own particularly effective way of disrupting his daughter's life. But the day after his funeral, Julia discovers that her father has one last surprise in store for her.

Without a doubt, the journey of a lifetime, and an opportunity to say, at last, all those things they had never said.

With this novel, Marc Levy creates a world of mischief and suspense. At its heart lies the relationship between a father and daughter, and a tale of first love, the kind of love that never dies.

Surfing in Stilettos

2016

by Carol Wyer

Amanda Wilson is all geared up for an exciting gap-year, travelling across Europe. She soon finds her plans thwarted when she is abandoned in France with only a cellarful of Chateau Plonk, a large, orange Space Hopper, and Old Ted, the dog, for company.

Fate has intervened to turn Amanda's life on its head. First, the campervan breaks down. Then her dopey son, Tom, who is staying in their house in the UK, begins wrecking it, one piece at a time. The jaw-dropping video Skype calls that her irrepressible mother insists on making are, by contrast, making Amanda's humdrum trip even less palatable.

Finally, she discovers that her new-found, French friend, Bibi Chevalier, had engineered a plan to ensure that her philandering husband would never stray again; unfortunately, Amanda is unwittingly drawn into the scheme, becoming a target.

Meanwhile, on a beach in Sydney, a lonely Todd Bradshaw realises that his first true love, Amanda Wilson, is definitely the only woman for him. Can he get back into her good books and hopefully back into her arms with his latest plan? Or will fate intervene yet again and turn everyone's lives upside down?

The Great Railway Bazaar

2006

by Paul Theroux

First published in 1975, Paul Theroux's strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here, Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains — the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express — are the stars of a journey that takes him on a loop eastbound from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian.

Brimming with Theroux's signature humor and wry keen observations, this engrossing chronicle is essential reading for both the ardent adventurer and the armchair traveler.

Ant Egg Soup

Natacha Du Pont de Bie is no ordinary tourist. She'll trek for hours or even days in search of a good lunch. Ant Egg Soup is the result of her adventures in Laos, the stories of the people she met, the places she visited and, of course, the amazing food she tasted.

Drinking raw turkey blood with herbs in a tribal village, cooking Paradise chicken in a little guest house by the Kung Si waterfalls, and sampling fried cricket during the Festival of the Golden Stupa are just a few examples.

Funny and refreshing, with recipes and line drawings, Ant Egg Soup will awaken the senses while redefining the art of travelling and eating abroad.

Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers

2005

by Louise Rennison

Georgia Nicolson is back with more mad, marvy confessions in this hilarious installment of her adventures. Join her as she embarks on a trip to Hamburger-a-gogo land (also known as America) in pursuit of Masimo, the Italian-American dreamboat. Will she succeed in becoming the composed sex kitten she aspires to be?

Georgia's escapades include learning the art of riding a bucking bronco and navigating the complexities of teenage life, complete with weird parents, mad cats, and the attentions of too many boys. Will she reel in the Italian dreamboat, or is she destined to live forever all aloney on her owney?

Get ready for a laugh-out-loud journey filled with teen drama, romantic escapades, and plenty of British humor.

Every Boy's Got One

2005

by Meg Cabot

Cartoonist Jane Harris is delighted by the prospect of her first-ever trip to Europe. But it's hate at first sight for Jane and Cal Langdon, and neither is too happy at the prospect of sharing a villa with one another for a week—not even in the beautiful and picturesque Marches countryside.

When Holly and Mark's wedding plans hit a major snag that only Jane and Cal can repair, the two find themselves having to put aside their mutual dislike for one another in order to get their best friends on the road to wedded bliss—and end up on a road themselves... one neither of them ever expected.

Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World

Tales of a Female Nomad is the captivating story of Rita Golden Gelman, an ordinary woman leading an extraordinary life. At the age of forty-eight, on the verge of a divorce, Rita left an elegant life in L.A. to follow her dream of connecting with people across cultures around the globe.

In 1986, she sold her possessions and embraced the life of a nomad. Her journey took her from living in a Zapotec village in Mexico to sleeping with sea lions on the Galapagos Islands. She experienced life in various settings, from thatched huts to regal palaces.

Rita observed orangutans in the rainforests of Borneo, visited trance healers and dens of black magic, and cooked with women over open fires worldwide. Her example encourages us all to dust off our dreams and rediscover the joy, exuberance, and hidden spirit that we often bury as adults.

The Songlines

1988

by Bruce Chatwin

In this extraordinary book, Bruce Chatwin has adapted a literary form common until the eighteenth century though rare in ours; a story of ideas in which two companions, traveling and talking together, explore the hopes and dreams that animate both them and the people they encounter.

Set in the almost uninhabitable regions of Central Australia, The Songlines asks and tries to answer these questions: Why is man the most restless, dissatisfied of animals? Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones always try to change it? Why have the great teachers—Christ or the Buddha—recommended the Road as the way to salvation? Do we agree with Pascal that all man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room?

We do not often ask these questions today for we commonly assume that living in a house is normal and that the wandering life is aberrant. But for more than twenty years, Chatwin has mulled over the possibility that the reverse might be the case.

Pre-colonial Australia was the last landmass on earth peopled not by herdsmen, farmers, or city dwellers, but by hunter-gatherers. Their labyrinths of invisible pathways across the continent are known to us as Songlines or Dreaming Tracks, but to the Aboriginals as the tracks of their ancestors—the Way of the Law. Along these "roads" they travel in order to perform all those activities that are distinctively human—song, dance, marriage, exchange of ideas, and arrangements of territorial boundaries by agreement rather than force.

In Chatwin's search for the Songlines, Arkady is an ideal friend and guide: Australian by birth, the son of a Cossack exile, with all the strength and warmth of his inheritance. Whether hunting kangaroo from a Land Cruiser or talking to the diminutive Rolf in his book-crammed trailer, Chatwin turns this almost implausible picaresque adventure into something approaching the scale of a Greek tragedy.

The life of the Aboriginals stands in vivid contrast, of course, to the prevailing cultures of our time. And The Songlines presents unforgettable details about the kinds of disputes we know all too well from less traumatic confrontations: over sacred lands invaded by railroads, mines, and construction sites, over the laws and rights of a poor people versus a wealthy invasive one. To Chatwin, these are but recent, local examples of an eternal basic distinction between settlers and wanderers.

His book, devoted to the latter, is a brilliant evocation of this profound optimism: that man is by nature not a bellicose aggressor but a pacific, song-creating, adaptive species whose destiny is to quest for the truth.

The Curse of Lono

The Curse of Lono is to Hawaii what Fear and Loathing was to Las Vegas: the crazy tales of a journalist's coverage of a news event that ends up being a wild ride to the dark side of Americana.

Originally published in 1983, Curse features all of the zany, hallucinogenic wordplay and feral artwork for which the Hunter S. Thompson/Ralph Steadman duo became known and loved.

This curious book, considered an oddity among Hunter's oeuvre, was long out of print, prompting collectors to search high and low for an original copy. TASCHEN's signed, limited edition sold out before the book even hit the stores, but this unlimited version, in a different, smaller format, makes The Curse of Lono accessible to everyone.

Outsourced World - Seducing Goddess Durga During the Clinton Era

This forthright narrative chronicles the author’s 1996 experiences as he adjusts to a massively transformed world. Emerging from 3 years in Saudi Arabia, and the 2 years prior cocooned in academia, he lands in Abu Dhabi to be hit with the triple-whammy of the NWO (1991), the WTO (1995), and the spigot of “India Inc.” opened wide.

Considered too old (at 40) by his feminized native land, and too white-skinned by the Zio-Globalists, he must now face hostile (multicultural) politics and the economic subterfuge orbiting a liberal American empire dedicated to outsourcing and open borders.

Follow this Engineer’s eclectic adventures from the U.A.E., Malaysia, and England [Book-1] then on to India [Book-2] as he somehow negotiates a series of traps, obstacles, and near calamities while occasionally pausing to seduce a few of the world’s most exotic women.

This true, instructional, and entertaining testimony delivers a slew of lessons about how the 1990s cemented the fiscal and “chronically unemployed” quagmire plaguing the Western World since Y2K. Mesmerized by the “Clinton White House”, most people refused to listen back then. Twenty or more years on, could this book open your eyes now?

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