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As a college student, he spent 16 days in the Pacific Ocean with five guys and a crate of canned meat. As a father, he took his kids on a world tour to eat ice cream with heads of state. He made friends in Uganda, and they liked him so much he became the Ugandan consul. He pursued his wife for three years before she agreed to date him. His grades weren't good enough to get into law school, so he sat on a bench outside the Dean's office for seven days until they finally let him enroll.

Bob Goff has become something of a legend, and his friends consider him the world's best-kept secret. Those same friends have long insisted he write a book. What follows are paradigm shifts, musings, and stories from one of the world's most delightfully engaging and winsome people. What fuels his impact? Love. But it's not the kind of love that stops at thoughts and feelings. Bob's love takes action. Bob believes Love Does.

When Love Does, life gets interesting. Each day turns into a hilarious, whimsical, meaningful chance that makes faith simple and real. Each chapter is a story that forms a book, a life. And this is one life you don't want to miss.

Light and fun, unique and profound, the lessons drawn from Bob's life and attitude just might inspire you to be secretly incredible, too.

Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads. William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about those little towns that get on the map — if they get on at all — only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi.

His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

Parnassus on Wheels is a delightful tale by Christopher Morley, featuring the spirited and adventurous Helen McGill.

Helen, a middle-aged spinster, has devoted her life to taking care of her brother Andrew and their successful traveling bookshop, known as Parnassus. However, she longs for adventure and freedom.

Her life takes an unexpected turn when the intriguing and quirky book salesman Roger Mifflin arrives at her door with an offer to buy Parnassus. Concerned that her brother is squandering his life on the road, Helen decides to sell the bookstore and embark on her own creative journey.

As she meets new people and navigates the world of bookselling, Helen quickly discovers that life on the road is both thrilling and challenging. Alongside Roger, she forms an unusual and heartwarming friendship, discovering not only literary delights but also the joys of companionship.

This heartwarming story is a must-read for book lovers, with its simple yet beautiful writing style and a strong, relatable protagonist.

Kate Moore is a working mother, struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to keep a spark in her marriage, and to maintain an increasingly unbearable life-defining secret. So when her husband is offered a lucrative job in Luxembourg, she jumps at the chance to leave behind her double-life, to start anew.

She begins to reinvent herself as an expat, finding her way in a language she doesn’t speak, doing the housewifely things she’s never before done—play-dates and coffee mornings, daily cooking and unending laundry. Meanwhile, her husband works incessantly, doing a job Kate has never understood, for a banking client she’s not allowed to know. He’s becoming distant and evasive; she’s getting lonely and bored.

Then another American couple arrives. Kate soon becomes suspicious that these people are not who they claim to be, and terrified that her own past is catching up to her. So Kate begins to dig, to peel back the layers of deception that surround her. She discovers fake offices and shell corporations and a hidden gun; a mysterious farmhouse and numbered accounts with bewildering sums of money; a complex web of intrigue where no one is who they claim to be, and the most profound deceptions lurk beneath the most normal-looking of relationships. A mind-boggling long-play con threatens her family, her marriage, and her life.

This Christmas season, join the girls of the mother-daughter book club for a variety of holiday-themed adventures!

Becca, Megan, Emma, Cassidy, and Jess have plenty of reading material to bring on their trips, too, because the book club is tackling the Betsy-Tacy series before their next meeting on New Year’s Eve. But unfortunately, nothing goes quite as planned for any of the girls.

On a Christmas cruise with their families, Megan and Becca fight over the dashing son of the ship's captain. Cassidy and her family fly back to California to visit Cassidy's sister Courtney... but when the West Coast causes homesickness for their former life in Laguna Beach, the family begins to question what state they should call home. And a disastrous sledding accident causes both Emma and Jess to completely change their holiday plans.

Between squabbles, injuries, and blizzards, everything seems to be going wrong. Will the girls be able to find their holiday spirit in time for Christmas?

Grief brought Finley to Ireland. Love will lead her home.

Finley Sinclair is not your typical eighteen-year-old. She's witty, tough, and driven. With an upcoming interview at the Manhattan music conservatory, Finley needs to compose her audition piece. But her creativity disappeared with the death of her older brother, Will.

She decides to study abroad in Ireland so she can follow Will's travel journal. It's the place he felt closest to God, and she's hopeful being there will help her make peace over losing him. So she agrees to an exchange program and boards the plane.

Beckett Rush, teen heartthrob and Hollywood bad boy, is flying to Ireland to finish filming his latest vampire movie. On the flight, he meets Finley. She's the one girl who seems immune to his charm. Undeterred, Beckett convinces her to be his assistant in exchange for his help as a tour guide.

Once in Ireland, Finley starts to break down. The loss of her brother and the pressure of school, her audition, and whatever it is that is happening between her and Beckett, leads her to a new and dangerous vice. When is God going to show up for her in this emerald paradise?

Then she experiences something that radically changes her perspective on life. Could it be God convincing her that everything she's been looking for has been with her all along?

It is January 16, 2009, and 60-year-old Barry Finlay and his son Chris are propped against a rock, struggling to draw a breath on their treacherous climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. Their destination is tantalizingly close, yet the weather and—more importantly—their health will determine the end result.

Barry's backpack holds a Canadian flag with the names of over 200 donors mobilized by the climbers back home. The donors have contributed to providing classrooms and clean water for desperately deserving school children in Tanzania. For Barry, this is a life-changing physical, mental, and spiritual adventure.

Follow along as he and his son strive to climb one of the World's Seven Summits, meet the children who will benefit from their fundraising, and come to an understanding that one or two people really can make a difference. It is a journey that leaves the two with the lasting impression that nothing is more satisfying than reaching a goal and giving others the opportunity to achieve theirs.

Amy Curry is having a terrible year. Her mother decides to move across the country and Amy is tasked with getting their car from California to Connecticut. The problem is, since her father's death, Amy hasn't been able to drive.

Enter Roger, the nineteen-year-old son of an old family friend, who is unexpectedly cute and has his own issues to deal with. Amy anticipated a straightforward road trip, but instead finds herself on a journey filled with unexpected detours. Along the Loneliest Road in America, through the Colorado mountains, across the Kansas plains, and past diners and motels, Amy's road trip turns into an exploration of personal growth and healing.

As Amy and Roger meet new people and face the reality of her father's death, they discover that sometimes the least expected individuals have the most to offer, and that you might have to get lost to find your way back home.

Ginny Blackstone thought that the biggest adventure of her life was behind her. She spent last summer traveling around Europe, following the tasks her aunt Peg laid out in a series of letters before she died. When someone stole Ginny's backpack—and the last little blue envelope inside—she resigned herself to never knowing how it was supposed to end.

Months later, a mysterious boy contacts Ginny from London, saying he's found her bag. Finally, Ginny can finish what she started. But instead of ending her journey, the last letter starts a new adventure—one filled with old friends, new loves, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Ginny finds she must hold on to her wits . . . and her heart. This time, there are no instructions.

Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West's classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups.

The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life. In this breathtakingly wide-ranging journalistic work, West richly chronicles her travels throughout Yugoslavia in the 1930s, introducing vivid characters and illuminating details.

More than a travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon connects the people and places West encounters to the long history of conflict that has formed national identities in the Balkans across a millennium of shifting alliances. West writes, “I had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past has made the present, and I wanted to see how the process works.”

As profound, sad, and funny as when it was first published in 1941, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon interrogates the forces that continue to shape our modern world.

Anna is looking forward to her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a great job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. Which is why she is less than thrilled about being shipped off to boarding school in Paris--until she meets Étienne St. Clair. Smart, charming, beautiful, Étienne has it all...including a serious girlfriend.

But in the City of Light, wishes have a way of coming true. Will a year of romantic near-misses end with their long-awaited French kiss?

In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal.

In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history—its science, economics, and politics—with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we’ll never think about it in the same way again.

With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known—Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)—to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.

Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia—a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny.

The Butterfly Mosque tells the extraordinary story of an all-American girl's conversion to Islam and her ensuing romance with a young Egyptian man. It is a stunning articulation of a Westerner embracing the Muslim world.

When G. Willow Wilson—already an accomplished writer on modern religion and the Middle East at just twenty-seven—leaves her atheist parents in Denver to study at Boston University, she enrolls in an Islamic Studies course that leads to her shocking conversion to Islam and sends her on a fated journey across continents and into an uncertain future.

She settles in Cairo where she teaches English and submerges herself in a culture based on her adopted religion. And then she meets Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland. They fall in love, entering into a daring relationship that calls into question the very nature of family, belief, and tradition.

Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow records her intensely personal struggle to forge a “third culture” that might accommodate her own values without compromising the friends and family on both sides of the divide.

In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, "like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away." You knew something gigantic was coming.

Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs.

Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.

A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace.

For many years Sierra Leone and Liberia have been too dangerous to travel through, bedevilled by a uniquely brutal form of violence from which sprang many of Africa's cruellest contemporary icons. This travel book touches on one of the most fraught parts of the globe at a different moment in its history.

Chasing the Devil tells the story of Tim Butcher's audacious expedition from Freetown at the mouth of the Sierra Leone river overland through forest-covered mountains and malarial plains to the coast of Liberia. He ventures deep into areas not visited by outsiders for years. Both nations are on a developmental cusp and Tim explores whether national and international attempts to chase away the devil of war can succeed.

Su Yen left Taiwan feeling hopeless and broken. In England, specifically in Oxford, her tutor introduces her to the sympathy, understanding, and beauty of English poetry and its potential healing power. Through the beauty of the language and the humanity of culture, she slowly revives.

This real-life story tells of a young woman from Taiwan, an interior designer, who comes to England for further study. She has two ambitions: to find a new meaning for her life, which has been broken by her experiences in Taiwan, and to immerse herself in the English culture she has read and dreamed about since childhood. Overcoming problems of lack of money and the difficulties of engaging with an unfamiliar language and culture, Su Yen achieves both her goals through her discoveries of the beauties and sympathy of English poetry, painting, and architecture, and the friendliness of many of the people she meets.

Su Yen's forgotten past is gradually revealed and healed with the magic of English poetry, which leads her to see the profound meaning of life. This book will appeal to readers with an interest in discovering English history and culture.

Papeles falsos, primer libro de Valeria Luiselli, está compuesto por una serie de ensayos narrativos de temas diversos, donde la constante es el registro de la original mirada de la autora, siempre presta a encontrar detalles o conexiones entre ideas de muy diverso orden, ecos de un pensamiento que por fuerza obliga al lector a repensar. La escondida tumba de Brodsky en Venecia; la inclasificable y elusiva saudade portuguesa; el lenguaje como ruptura con la «infancia previa a la infancia», son algunos de los ingeniosos pretextos para el despliegue de una escritura precisa, que nos deja la impresión de estar presenciando en persona esas particularidades, guiados por un lúcido filtro que sugiere múltiples variaciones de una realidad que se transforma con el pasar de su lectura.

The life of a traveling merchant is a lonely one, a fact with which Kraft Lawrence is well acquainted. Wandering from town to town with just his horse, cart, and whatever wares have come his way, the peddler has pretty well settled into his routine—that is, until the night Lawrence finds a wolf goddess asleep in his cart.

Taking the form of a fetching girl with wolf ears and a tail, Holo has wearied of tending to harvests in the countryside and strikes up a bargain with the merchant to lend him the cunning of "Holo the Wisewolf" to increase his profits in exchange for taking her along on his travels. What kind of businessman could turn down such an offer?

Lawrence soon learns, though, that having an ancient goddess as a traveling companion can be a bit of a mixed blessing. Will this wolf girl turn out to be too wild to tame?

If you fall too fast, you just might crash...

Daisy has been dumped, unceremoniously jilted. Not by any ordinary guy, no... Daisy has a secret in her past that she won't even tell her best friend, Holly. She's given up on men - and on her own family. But life still has to be lived and where better to recover than as far away from home as possible.

Grabbing a chance to see the world, Daisy packs her bags and joins the team catering to the world's highest-paid, supercharged racing drivers on the Formula 1 Grand Prix circuit. From Brazil to Italy, from Melbourne to Monte Carlo, life passes in a dizzying whirlwind. But nothing - and no one - can stop Daisy from falling again... this time for a man who is prepared to risk his life, and his heart, for the sake of speed, danger, and ultimate success.

Seven Years in Tibet recounts the extraordinary journey of Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian, who escaped from an English internment camp in India in 1943. Over the next seven years, Harrer immersed himself in the rich tapestry of Tibetan life, observing its social practices, religion, politics, and people.

This vivid memoir offers an unparalleled glimpse into a world just before the Chinese Communist takeover, presenting a fascinating narrative of adventure, resilience, and cultural exchange. Harrer's account illuminates the complexities of Tibetan society and his unique relationship with the young Dalai Lama, offering insights into the spiritual and political upheavals that would soon transform Tibet.

National Geographic leads book-loving adventurers on a whirlwind tour of 500 literary landmarks and offers practical trip-planning advice for visiting in person. Peppered with great reading suggestions and little-known tales of literary gossip, this book is the ultimate browser's delight.

Novel Destinations invites readers to follow in the footsteps of much-loved authors, discover the scenes that sparked their imaginations, glimpse the lives they led, and share a bit of the experiences they transformed so eloquently into print.

If you’re looking to indulge in literary adventure, you’ll find all the inspiration and information you need here, along with behind-the-scenes stories such as these:

• After Ernest Hemingway survived two near-fatal plane crashes during an African safari, he perused his obituaries and sipped champagne on a canal-side terrace in Venice.
• Washington Irving's wisteria-draped cottage in the Hudson Valley was once occupied by members of the Van Tassel family, immortalized in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
• A mysterious incident at a stone tower near Dublin made such a vivid impression on James Joyce that he drew on it for the opening scene of Ulysses.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle consulted on the mystery of Agatha Christie's 1926 disappearance before she resurfaced under an assumed name in northern England.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables was inspired by a seaside manse in Salem, Massachusetts, infamous witch trials in which his ancestor played a role.

Amy and Dan Cahill have been located once again, this time in the company of the notoriously unreliable Alistair Oh. Could they have been foolish enough to make an alliance?

Spies report that Amy and Dan seem to be tracking the life of one of the most powerful fighters the world has ever known. If this fearsome warrior was a Cahill, his secrets are sure to be well-guarded... and the price to uncover them just might be lethal.

In 1996, Allan Weisbecker sold his home and possessions, loaded his dog and surfboards into his truck, and set off in search of his long-time surfing companion, Patrick, who had vanished into the depths of Central America.

This rollicking memoir chronicles his quest from Mexico to Costa Rica to unravel the circumstances of Patrick's disappearance. Weisbecker intimately describes the people he befriended, the bandits he evaded, and the waves he caught and lost en route to finding his friend.

Join Weisbecker on this adventurous journey, exploring themes of friendship, duty, and the pursuit of paradise.

State by State is a panoramic portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. This collection celebrates and appreciates all fifty states (and Washington, D.C.) through the eyes of fifty-one acclaimed writers.

Inspired by the Depression-era WPA guides, this anthology features delightful essays on the American character. Contributors include renowned and bestselling authors such as Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Franzen, Ann Patchett, Anthony Bourdain, William T. Vollmann, S.E. Hinton, Dave Eggers, Myla Goldberg, Rick Moody, and Alexander Payne.

Experience the full plumage of American life, in all its riotous glory, as these essays take you on a journey through the states, each with its own unique flavor and story.

George R. Stewart’s classic study of place-naming in the United States was written during World War II as a tribute to the varied heritage of the nation’s peoples. More than half a century later, Names on the Land remains the authoritative source on its subject, while Stewart’s intimate knowledge of America and love of anecdote make his book a unique and delightful window on American history and social life.

Names on the Land is a fascinating and fantastically detailed panorama of language in action. Stewart opens with the first European names in what would later be the United States—Ponce de León’s flowery Florída, Cortés’s semi-mythical isle of California, and the red Rio Colorado—before going on to explore New England, New Amsterdam, and New Sweden, the French and the Russian legacies, and the unlikely contributions of everybody from border ruffians to Boston Brahmins.

These lively pages examine where and why Indian names were likely to be retained; nineteenth-century fads that gave rise to dozens of Troys and Athens and to suburban Parksides, Brookmonts, and Woodcrest Manors; and deep and enduring mysteries such as why “Arkansas” is Arkansaw, except of course when it isn’t.

Names on the Land will engage anyone who has ever wondered at the curious names scattered across the American map. Stewart’s answer is always a story—one of the countless stories that lie behind the rich and strange diversity of the USA.

A compulsively readable account of a journey to the Congo — a country virtually inaccessible to the outside world — vividly told by a daring and adventurous journalist.

Ever since Stanley first charted its mighty river in the 1870s, the Congo has epitomized the dark and turbulent history of a failed continent. However, its troubles only served to increase the interest of Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher, who was sent to cover Africa in 2000. Before long he became obsessed with the idea of recreating Stanley’s original expedition — but travelling alone.

Despite warnings Butcher spent years poring over colonial-era maps and wooing rebel leaders before making his will and venturing to the Congo’s eastern border. He passed through once thriving cities of this country and saw the marks left behind by years of abuse and misrule. Almost, 2,500 harrowing miles later, he reached the Atlantic Ocean, a thinner and a wiser man.

Butcher’s journey was a remarkable feat. But the story of the Congo, vividly told in Blood River, is more remarkable still.

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World is a captivating journey by Eric Weiner, who spent a decade as a foreign correspondent. Weiner reported from discontented locales such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Indonesia, where the unhappy people living in profoundly unstable states inspired pathos and made for good stories, but not good karma.

Admitted grump and self-help book aficionado, Weiner undertook a year's research to travel the globe, looking for the "unheralded happy places." The result is a book that is equal parts laugh-out-loud funny and philosophical, a journey into both the definition of and the destination for true contentment.

Apparently, the happiest places on earth include, somewhat unexpectedly, Iceland, Bhutan, and India. Weiner also visits the country deemed most malcontent, Moldova, and finds real merit in the claim. But the question remains: What makes people happy? Is it the freedom of the West or the myriad restrictions of Singapore? The simple ashrams of India or the glittering shopping malls of Qatar?

From the youthful drunkenness of Iceland to the despondency of Slough, a sad but resilient town in Heathrow's flight path, Weiner offers wry yet profound observations about the way people relate to circumstance and fate.

Both revealing and inspirational, perhaps the best thing about this hilarious trip across four continents is that for the reader, the "geography of bliss" is wherever they happen to find themselves while reading it.

New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.

The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.

A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

Night Train to Lisbon is a captivating novel that delves into the depths of our shared humanity, offering a breathtaking insight into life, love, and literature itself. This compelling exploration of consciousness examines the possibility of truly understanding another person and the ability of language to define our very selves.

Raimund Gregorius, a Latin teacher at a Swiss college, encounters a mysterious Portuguese woman and decides to abandon his old life to start anew. He takes the night train to Lisbon, carrying with him a book by Amadeu de Prado, a fictional Portuguese doctor and essayist whose writings explore loneliness, mortality, friendship, love, and loyalty.

Gregorius becomes obsessed with what he reads and restlessly struggles to comprehend the life of the author. His investigations lead him all over the city of Lisbon, as he speaks to those entangled in Prado’s life. Gradually, the picture of an extraordinary man emerges—a doctor and poet who rebelled against Salazar’s dictatorship.

Louis Charles Lynch (also known as Lucy) is sixty years old and has lived in Thomaston, New York, his entire life. He and Sarah, his wife of forty years, are about to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston.

Perhaps for this reason Lucy is writing the story of his town, his family, and his own life that makes up this rich and mesmerizing novel, interspersed with that of the native son who left so long ago and has never looked back.

Bridge of Sighs, from the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls, is a moving novel about small-town America that expands Russo's widely heralded achievement in ways both familiar and astonishing.

Five Weeks in a Balloon is the first book in Jules Verne's Extraordinary Voyages series. It tells the adventurous tale of three Englishmen who attempt to cross Africa, from east to west, in a hot air balloon.

Dr. Samuel Ferguson, a rational and daring scientist, leads the expedition. He is accompanied by his loyal manservant Joe and his sporting friend Dick Kennedy. The trio embarks on a series of thrilling adventures as they encounter various challenges, including natives, dangerous animals, and the unpredictable African weather.

Throughout the journey, Verne's vivid descriptions of the African landscape, flora, and fauna provide a rich backdrop to the story. The novel, first published in 1863, reflects the European fascination with African exploration during the 19th century and includes references to actual expeditions of that time.

This classic work combines elements of science fiction, adventure, and comedy, showcasing Verne's unique storytelling style that has captivated readers for generations.

Marco Polo was nicknamed "Marco of the millions" because his Venetian countrymen took the grandiose stories of his travels to be exaggerated, if not outright lies. As he lay dying, his priest, family, and friends offered him a last chance to confess his mendacity, and Marco, it is said, replied, "I have not told the half of what I saw and did."

Now, Gary Jennings has imagined the half that Marco left unsaid as even more elaborate and adventurous than the tall tales thought to be lies. From the palazzi and back streets of medieval Venice to the sumptuous court of Kublai Khan, from the perfumed sexuality of the Levant to the dangers and rigors of travel along the Silk Road, Marco meets all manner of people, survives all manner of danger, and, insatiably curious, becomes an almost compulsive collector of customs, languages, and women.

In more than two decades of travel, Marco was variously a merchant, a warrior, a lover, a spy, even a tax collector - but always a journeyer, unflagging in his appetite for new experiences, regretting only what he missed.

Here - recreated and reimagined with all the splendor, the love of adventure, the zest for the rare and curious that are Jennings's hallmarks - is the epic account, at once magnificent and delightful, of the greatest real-life adventurer in human history.

Seattle's Fremont is lovingly labeled by locals as the “Center of the Universe”. It is one of Seattle's most eclectic and dynamic neighborhoods. Just over a century ago, it was little more than lush primeval forest, but it has grown into a vibrant community.

The area developed as the home of the city's blue-collar workers and became a bohemian haven for local artists. Today, it's a thriving urban mecca filled with bars, restaurants, hip boutiques, and art studios that cater to the worldly aware.

Most recently, Fremont has become the address of high-tech giants like Adobe. It continues to evolve, reflecting the changes in industry that have contributed to Fremont's reputation as an urban area on the cutting edge.

What's an American girl with a big mouth, but an equally big heart, to do?

Lizzie Nichols has a problem, and it isn't that she doesn't have the slightest idea what she's going to do with her life, or that she's blowing what should be her down payment on a cute little Manhattan apartment on a trip to London to visit her long-distance boyfriend, Andrew. But what's the point of planning for the future when she's done it again? See, Lizzie can't keep her mouth shut. And it's not just that she can't keep her own secrets, she can't keep anything to herself.

This time when she opens her big mouth, her good intentions get Andrew in major hot water. So now Lizzie's stuck in London with no boyfriend and no place to stay until the departure date written on her non-refundable airline ticket.

Fortunately, there's Shari, Lizzie's best friend and college roommate, who's spending her summer in southern France, catering weddings with her boyfriend, Chaz, in a sixteenth-century château. One call and Lizzie's on a train to Souillac. Who cares if she's never traveled alone in her life and only speaks rudimentary French? One glimpse of gorgeous Château Mirac - not to mention gorgeous Luke, the son of Château Mirac's owner - and she's smitten.

But while most caterers can be trusted to keep a secret, Lizzie's the exception. And no sooner has the first cork been popped than Luke hates her, the bride is in tears, and it looks like Château Mirac is in danger of becoming a lipo-recovery spa. As if things aren't bad enough, her ex-boyfriend Andrew shows up looking for closure (or at least a loan), threatening to ruin everything, especially Lizzie's chance at ever finding real love...

Unless she can figure out a way to use that big mouth of hers to save the day.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism.

This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

The Devil's Picnic is a captivating journey into illicit pleasures from around the globe. From Norwegian moonshine to the pentobarbital sodium sipped by suicide tourists in Switzerland, and in between, baby eels killed by an infusion of tobacco, a garlicky Spanish stew of bull’s testicles, tea laced with cocaine, and malodorous French cheese, Taras Grescoe crafts a vivid travelogue of forbidden indulgences.

As Grescoe crisscrosses the globe in pursuit of his quarry, he delves into questions of regional culture and repressive legislation—from clandestine absinthe distillation in an obscure Swiss valley to the banning of poppy seed biscuits in Singapore. He launches into a philosophical investigation of what’s truly bizarre: how something as fundamental as the plants and foods we consume could be so vilified and demonized.

This book is an investigation into what thrills us, what terrifies us, and what would make us travel ten thousand miles and evade the local authorities. The Devil’s Picnic is a delicious and compelling expedition into the heart of vice and desire.

When Ginny receives thirteen little blue envelopes and instructions to buy a plane ticket to London, she knows something exciting is going to happen. What Ginny doesn't know is that she will have the adventure of her life and it will change her in more ways than one. Life and love are waiting for her across the Atlantic, and the thirteen little blue envelopes are the key to finding them in this funny, romantic, heartbreaking novel.

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim. Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."

Kambing Jantan: Sebuah Catatan Harian Pelajar Bodoh is a delightful non-fiction diary by Raditya Dika. This book offers a humorous and candid glimpse into the author's life as an Indonesian teenager studying in Australia.

Filled with witty anecdotes and cultural reflections, readers are taken on a journey through the ups and downs of teenage life, far from home.

It's a fun and engaging read that captures the essence of youth, identity, and adventure. Perfect for those who enjoy humor and cultural experiences!

In this New York Times bestseller, follow the author of The Notebook as he travels the world with his brother learning about faith, loss, connection, and hope. As moving as his bestselling works of fiction, Nicholas Sparks's unique memoir, written with his brother, chronicles the life-affirming journey of two brothers bound by memories, both humorous and tragic.

In January 2003, Nicholas Sparks and his brother, Micah, set off on a three-week trip around the globe. It was to mark a milestone in their lives, for at thirty-seven and thirty-eight respectively, they were now the only surviving members of their family. Against the backdrop of the wonders of the world and often overtaken by their feelings, daredevil Micah and the more serious, introspective Nicholas recalled their rambunctious childhood adventures and the tragedies that tested their faith. And in the process, they discovered startling truths about loss, love, and hope.

Narrated with irrepressible humor and rare candor, and including personal photos, Three Weeks with My Brother reminds us to embrace life with all its uncertainties... and most of all, to cherish the joyful times, both small and momentous, and the wonderful people who make them possible.

Discover the tantalizing true stories behind your favorite colors.

Cleopatra used saffron—a source of the color yellow—for seduction. Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects.

In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artist’s palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself.

How did the most precious color blue travel all the way from remote lapis mines in Afghanistan to Michelangelo’s brush? What is the connection between brown paint and ancient Egyptian mummies? Why did Robin Hood wear Lincoln green? Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time.

Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfish–which probably meant their scent preceded them. In the eighteenth century, black dye was called logwood and grew along the Spanish Main. Some of the first indigo plantations were started in America, amazingly enough, by a seventeen-year-old girl named Eliza.

The popular van Gogh painting White Roses at Washington’s National Gallery had to be renamed after a researcher discovered that the flowers were originally done in a pink paint that had faded nearly a century ago. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes–painted all the more dazzling by Finlay’s engaging style.

Embark upon a thrilling adventure with this intrepid journalist as she travels on a donkey along ancient silk trade routes; with the Phoenicians sailing the Mediterranean in search of a special purple shell that garners wealth, sustenance, and prestige; with modern Chilean farmers breeding and bleeding insects for their viscous red blood. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.

"Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. So begins The Towers of Trebizond, the greatest novel by Rose Macaulay, one of the eccentric geniuses of English literature.

In this fine and funny adventure set in the backlands of modern Turkey, a group of highly unusual travel companions makes its way from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond. Along the way, they encounter potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and Billy Graham on tour with a busload of Southern evangelists.

But though the dominant note of the novel is humorous, its pages are shadowed by heartbreak as the narrator confronts the specters of ancient empires, religious turmoil, and painful memories of lost love.

All Joy Randall wants is a little old-fashioned romance, but when she participates in a "Goddess evoking" ceremony with her friend, Roxy, Joy finds out her future true love is a man with the potential to put her immortal soul in danger.

At first, the ever-practical Joy is ready to dismiss her vision as a product of too much gin and too many vampire romances, but while traveling through the Czech Republic with Roxy, Joy begins to have some second thoughts about her mystery lover because she is suddenly plagued by visions of a lethally handsome stranger.

Then, when she and Roxy attend a local GothFaire, Joy meets Raphael Griffin St. John, head of security, and she becomes even more bewildered because the dark and dangerous Raphael seems too close to her dreams for comfort.

In his first novel, Dave Eggers has written an entertaining and profoundly original moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the world trying to give away a lot of money and free themselves from a profound loss.

This book reminds us once again what an important, necessary talent Dave Eggers is. Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere.

Join the journey of these friends as they navigate through different cultures and experiences, offering readers a unique blend of humor and emotional depth.

Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs.

In Laputa, a flying island, he encounters a society of speculators and projectors who have lost all grip on everyday reality; while they plan and calculate, their country lies in ruins. Gulliver's final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses whom he quickly comes to admire - in contrast to the Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans. This text, based on the first edition of 1726, reproduces all the original illustrations and includes an introduction by Robert Demaria, Jr, which discusses the ways Gulliver's Travels has been interpreted since its first publication.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was born in Dublin. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Nepal Air Disaster — No Survivors. This newspaper headline transforms Tintin’s holiday into an extraordinary adventure. The little reporter learns that his friend, Chang, was in the aircraft that crashed, and that there were no survivors. Nevertheless, the strength of their friendship and some powerful and vivid dreams convince Tintin to set off to rescue Chang, whom he believes is still alive.

Accompanied by his faithful companion, Captain Haddock, Tintin sets out for the site of the crash. The trek through the Himalayas is merciless. Despite several major setbacks and the fact that his companions seem to give up hope, Tintin’s faith is unshakable. Unfortunately, finding Chang is made even more difficult by the presence of the “Abominable Snowman” (the Yeti) — a mysterious, wild beast.