Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas is an insightful and perspective-shifting journey by celebrated journalist Omar Mouallem. In the book, Mouallem explores his personal connection with Islam, delving into its influence on his values, politics, and heritage. Having grown up in a Muslim household, he later adopted atheism and used his voice to critique organized religion. However, as a father, Mouallem is confronted with the challenges his children may face due to their heritage in an increasingly nativist Western world.

Mouallem embarks on a quest to uncover the untold history of Islam across the Americas, visiting thirteen unique mosques from California to Quebec, and Brazil to Canada's icy north. Through his travels, he encounters diverse Muslim communities, each providing varied perspectives on what it means to be Muslim in the Americas. This exploration reveals the significant role Islam has played in shaping the continent, influencing everything from industrialization to political shifts.

Ultimately, Praying to the West uncovers a hidden narrative of home and belonging. It highlights the ongoing struggle for acceptance in towns and cities across the Americas, advocating for a more inclusive future for all.

Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She's a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she's in New York City, and he's in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.

Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven't spoken since.

Poppy has everything she should want, but she's stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.

Bella Figura: How to Live, Love, and Eat the Italian Way is one woman's story of finding beauty, and herself. Beyond being a captivating narrative, it serves as a practical guide to living a better life, the Italian way. Kamin Mohammadi, a magazine editor in London, was ostensibly living the dream. Yet, heartbreak and loneliness compounded with the stress of her demanding career were detrimental to her physical and mental well-being.

Fortune smiled upon her in the form of a redundancy package and the offer of a friend's apartment in Florence, prompting Kamin to take a transformative leap. In Italy, she quickly noticed the stark contrast in lifestyle: her new Italian neighbors prioritized enjoyment, indulging in leisurely meals and drinks, embracing a slower pace of life. This narrative is peppered with delightful encounters, from the local bartender who doubles as a love advisor, to the plumbers who not only fix her heating but also teach her the art of making pasta al pomodoro.

This book is an homage to the Italian mantra of savoring the beauty of every day—a philosophy that has been cherished by generations. It's a tale of finding love and self-love in the most unexpected of places, and an intimate portrayal of a year spent embracing the Italian way of life.

A breathtaking journey toward self-discovery and true love, from the author of If I Stay.

When sheltered American good girl Allyson "LuLu" Healey first meets laid-back Dutch actor Willem De Ruiter at an underground performance of Twelfth Night in England, there's an undeniable spark. After just one day together, that spark bursts into a flame, or so it seems to Allyson, until the following morning, when she wakes up after a whirlwind day in Paris to discover that Willem has left.

Over the next year, Allyson embarks on a journey to come to terms with the narrow confines of her life, and through Shakespeare, travel, and a quest for her almost-true-love, to break free of those confines.

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.

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.

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.

Set in the 1860s, Silk weaves a tale of Hervé Joncour, a French silkworm merchant, as he travels to Japan—a country closed to foreigners—to acquire silkworm eggs amidst an epidemic threatening France's silk trade. The journey is not only a commercial venture but also a personal odyssey, leading to an illicit and silent affair with a concubine who has "eyes that are not Oriental."

As Joncour makes his clandestine deals with a local baron, the passion between him and the concubine unfolds through subtle, clandestine messages across his visits. Alessandro Baricco's narrative, as smooth and lustrous as the silk in question, spins a story of love that is both enigmatic and intense, highlighting the complexities of connection and desire.