Here are 100 books that Wanderlust fans have personally recommended if you like
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I started writing my debut novel Kismet during the 2020 covid lockdown. I was quarantining in my small NYC apartment and, like many, wishing I could be anywhere else. Enter: the power of books. I’ve always loved reading for how it transports you around the world. My novel takes place in the eponymous sun-soaked beach town of Kismet, Fire Island, and writing it offered an escape. It reminded me of how reading books like below felt like embarking on my very own magical getaway, from Positano or London, to Alaska or Palm Springs, all from the comfort of home. I hope you find similar adventure in these novels’ pages.
If you’ve ever wanted to take an Alaskan cruise, The Unsinkable Greta Jamesis the perfect book for you.
The sights are breathtaking, the cruise culture is endearingly infectious, but it’s with the characters where this novel truly sings. And I don’t only mean that metaphorically speaking: the titular protagonist Greta James is a famous indie musician who has followed her career to great success, despite her father’s discouragement of the unstable path.
When Greta’s mother unexpectedly passes away, she decides to take her mom’s spot on the Alaskan cruise that her parents had booked to celebrate their anniversary. Over the course of the trip, Greta and her father must reconcile their differences, grieve their aching loss, and find a way back to each other.
An indie musician reeling from tragedy and a public breakdown reconnects with her father on a weeklong cruise in “a pitch-perfect story about the ways we recover love in the strangest places” (Rebecca Serle, bestselling author of In Five Years)
“The characters are drawn with a generosity that allows them to be wrong but also right, loving but also prone to missteps, and ultimately deserving of a resolution that’s full of hope.”—Linda Holmes, New York Times bestselling author of Flying Solo
Right after the sudden death of her mother—her first and most devoted fan—and just before the launch of her…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have always been drawn to the ocean. When I decided to start writing novels, I knew that I wanted to set them in coastal locations. I live in the Boston suburbs and spend time whenever I can at the beach. I have written books centered in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Cape Cod. I am working on a story set on the north shore of Massachusetts. I am a high school social studies teacher of twenty-four years and a parent of two teenagers. All of my writing includes cooking and the enjoyment of good food as a major focus. I hope my books make you hungry!
Although not coastal, this book’s Palm Springs setting is full of swimming pools and a feeling of escape to somewhere new. I laughed, I cried, and I adored the dynamic between Patrick and his adorable niece and nephew.
Secondary characters, such as the three neighbors and other family members, added depth and emotion to the story. I seriously read this book in 24 hours!
National Bestseller • Wall Street Journal Bestseller • USA Today Bestseller An NPR Book of the Year Semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor Finalist for the 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards
From the bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus and The Editor comes a warm and deeply funny novel about a once-famous gay sitcom star whose unexpected family tragedy leaves him with his niece and nephew for the summer.
Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them when they come out…
As a romance and rom-com writer, summer love stories are my favorite to read. We change during the summer months—our schedules are less rigorous, we get out and see the world, we can be a little reckless with our decisions because everything feels temporary, and we show the world a more relaxed side of ourselves. In cuffing season, we attach ourselves to another person to get through the cold months with a warm body by our side. Meanwhile, in summertime, we don’t feel burdened to get through it with another person. But the night swimming and salt air romance allows surprising love stories to ignite.
This book drenched me in the romance of a woman escaping her real life, and for most of the book, it made me want to fly to Positano and never return.
I loved how Serle uses magical realism to help Katy grieve the loss of her mother and explore how she feels about her own marriage. I was heartbroken and in awe throughout the book, and I’ve never seen a mother-daughter relationship explored so tenderly as Katy and Carol.
“Rebecca Serle is a maestro of love in all its forms.” —Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times bestselling author
The New York Times bestselling author of In Five Years returns with a powerful novel about the transformational love between mothers and daughters set on the breathtaking Amalfi Coast.
When Katy’s mother dies, she is left reeling. Carol wasn’t just Katy’s mom, but her best friend and first phone call. She had all the answers and now, when Katy needs her the most, she is gone. To…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I started writing my debut novel Kismet during the 2020 covid lockdown. I was quarantining in my small NYC apartment and, like many, wishing I could be anywhere else. Enter: the power of books. I’ve always loved reading for how it transports you around the world. My novel takes place in the eponymous sun-soaked beach town of Kismet, Fire Island, and writing it offered an escape. It reminded me of how reading books like below felt like embarking on my very own magical getaway, from Positano or London, to Alaska or Palm Springs, all from the comfort of home. I hope you find similar adventure in these novels’ pages.
I read Sarah Jio’s latest novel, With Love from London,during the height of the covid lockdown, but it truly felt like I had transported from my NYC apartment to the charming streets of London’s Primrose Hill.
Alternating between dual timelines, we follow the story of a woman inheriting her estranged mother’s bookstore, punctuated by flashbacks with what inspired her mother to open the bookstore in the first place.
It is a story of love, family, destiny, and the duty we have not only to ourselves but also to each other. Filled with book-lover flair and London quirks, Jio paints a moving portrait of complicated family dynamics, offering ultimately a way to find our way back to love.
It left my cheeks wet and my heart yearning for a trip to London.
When librarian Valentina Baker was a teenager, her mother, Eloise, unexpectedly fled to her native London, leaving Val and her father on their own. Now in her thirties and fresh out of a failed marriage, Val feels a nagging disenchantment with her life — and knows she is still heartbroken over her mother’s abandonment.
I love learning about history, and the more I learn, the more I appreciate my place in this world. While military history, particularly from pre-WW1 to the end of WW2, was what made me first plant my nose in a book, I can geek out on pretty much any historical period: the rise of human civilization, Rome, the conquest of the New World, the development of airplanes. But it’s the personal element that most draws me in, and the fact that we humans remain fundamentally the same in how we cope with another through the ages. It’s through fiction that we see the past in a way that makes sense.
I’ve tried several times to understand the Mexican Revolution, with its cast of martyrs and rouges scrambling in a violent tornado of noble intentions and bloody treachery. Nava artfully demonstrates his chops as a writer by paring this seemingly incomprehensible sweep of Mexican history into an accessible and compelling narrative.
His characters are complicated and nuanced—Nava gives us no easy answers—and we watch them flail for salvation and fleeting promises even as society collapses around them.
In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a tiny elite that apes European culture, grows rich from foreign investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Diaz, the ruthless and inscrutable president of the Republic.
Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilan. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe…
Ever since I was a little guy, I've been told that I complicate things unnecessarily. I overthink and over-communicate, and often, my feelings are outsized to the situation. These are not things I do on purpose, but involuntary, like a sneeze or the way you reflexively clench with cuteness aggression when you see a grizzly bear’s little ears, even though you know it can hurt and eat and kill you. I love to find books with narrators who seemingly share this affliction. It makes me feel less alone, but more importantly, I love to see how other people's Rube Goldberg machines function.
I didn't realize a book could get the zoomies. América del Norte has instilled in me such great wonder and vicious prose envy that I may never recover. Rambunctious, bombastic, and sprawling, this work of autofiction left me saying things like, “No way!” and “What the hell?!” out loud like a complete buffoon. Sometimes because of the story and sometimes because of the audacity of the sentence structures.
Medina Mora weaves history, literature, politics, translation, and much more into a grand chronicle. Amid devastating historical narratives and global tragedy, I still laughed out loud at some parts and startled my little cat, who then also got the zoomies.
Moving between New York City, Mexico City, and Iowa City, a young member of the Mexican elite sees his life splinter in a centuries-spanning debut that blends the Latin American traditions of Roberto Bolaño and Fernanda Melchor with the autofiction of US writers like Ben Lerner and Teju Cole.
Sebastián lived a childhood of privilege in Mexico City. Now in his twenties, he has a degree from Yale, an American girlfriend, and a slot in the University of Iowa’s MFA program.
But Sebastián’s life is shaken by the Trump administration’s restrictions on immigrants, his mother’s terminal cancer, the cracks in…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
Writing my history of the 1746 earthquake and tsunami that walloped much of Peru taught me that disasters serve as great entryways into society. They not only provide a snapshot (today's selfie) of where people were and what they were doing at a given moment (think Pompei) but also bring to light and even accentuate social and political tensions. I have lived my adult life between Peru and California and have experienced plenty of earthquakes. I continue to teach on "natural" disasters and have begun a project on the 1600 Huaynaputina volcano that affected the global climate.
This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican history.
In September 19, 1985, a powerful earthquake hit Mexico City in the early morning hours. As the city collapses, the government fails to respond. Long a voice of social conscience, prominent Mexican journalist, Elena Poniatowska chronicles the disintegration of the city's physical and social structure, the widespread grassroots organizing against government corruption and incompetence, and the reliency of the human spirit. As a transformative moment in the life of Mexican society, the earthquake is as much a component of the country's current crisis as the 1982 debt crisis, the problematic economic of the last ten years, and the recent elections.…
I write in my spare time, drawing inspiration from my frequent trips to Italy, dating back to my childhood summers. I am an indie writer of noir crime fiction with an interest in uncomfortable moments, especially those created by the main characters themselves. My list journeys across a vast array of genres, but they all have that tone of something happening in the shadows or underlying truths working to achieve an outcome or fight against adversity. I like unspoken dialogue and self-made conflicts, which are both elements included in all the stories I mention in this list.
I enjoyed how this story takes an everyday person that we can all relate to, and with one urge of curiosity, she is easily sucked into a dangerous world of crime and murder.
Throughout her story, she finds herself investigating unseen and unknown by dangerous people. She herself may be unaware of any danger until she dives further into her curiosities. And within it all, there is a slow and natural element of romance.
I appreciate Moreno-Garcia’s characters for their realness and natural way of moving through the story.
1970s Mexico City: while student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite seeks escape from her humdrum life in the stories of passion and danger filling the latest issue of Secret Romance.
She is deeply envious of her neighbour, a beautiful art student apparently living the life of excitement and intrigue Maite craves - so when Leonora disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman, journeying deep into Leonora's secret life of student radicals and dissidents.
'Cements Silvia Moreno-Garcia's incredible versatility as an amazing writer who moves between genres effortlessly. A lush, magnificent trip into…
Like many who carry over childish curiosity into adulthood, I'm attracted to forbidden places. I trespass. When I heard that a portion of South Africa’s coast was owned by the De Beers conglomerate and closed to the public for nearly 80 years, plunging the local communities into mysterious isolation, I became obsessed with visiting the place. Afterward, I began studying carrier pigeons—the amazing flying things that folks use to smuggle diamonds out of the mines. I wrote a book about this, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers. I'm also the author of nonfiction books about the first-ever photograph of the giant squid, working on a medical marijuana farm, and American food culture.
Valeria Luiselli dissects the odd systems and networks of our world’s cities and reveals in their hidden corners and corridors strange and magical identities. Luiselli’s essays further interrogate a city’s relationship to the bodies, cultures, artifacts, and languages that inhabit its spaces. In the essay, “Flying Home,” Luiselli journeys to Mexico City, the place of her birth, and, staring out of her airplane window, considers the city’s layout from this great height. This act of “mapping” according to her extraordinary vantage (suspended in flight), allows for a greater, incantatory meditation on our various perceptions of “home,” and how said perceptions depend as much on the imagination and on ephemeral memories as they do on reality.
Luiselli's essays (originally published in Mexico) have been released to great acclaim abroad and has been translated for and published in the UK, Italy, Germany, and The Netherlands Alma Guillermoprieto called Luiselli "one of the most important new voices in Mexican writing" at BEA and Luiselli is similarly known to and beloved by Latin American writers and venues including PEN America, the Americas Society, and the Mexican Cultural Institute Luiselli's work is well known to bilingual Spanish language readers (including invitations to appear at Instituto Cervantes in Chicago and the Spanish language bookclub at McNally Jackson) Luiselli is an engaging…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
When I read, I want to read something that’s going to make me feel something. My friends make fun of me because, whether it is music or books, I want to have my heart shattered into a million pieces and then put back together. And when a little magic is added to the mix, it only makes the story richer and more heartbreaking. This list is everything I love about magical middle grades that makes me feel something on a deeper level about what it means to be human.
Lola is a beautiful blend of fantasy and magical realism about a sister and brother who would do anything for each other. This story really took me by surprise. I saw the gorgeous cover online after a friend told me to check it out. She knew it was going to be a book I loved, and wow!
I was blown away by its vivid setting, quirky cast of characters, sibling love, and gut-punch ending. I don’t want to give anything away, but this book made me cry and left an ache in my heart long after finishing it.
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This book is for kids age
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What is this book about?
A simmering tale of magic, adventure, and the extraordinary bond between a brother and sister who'd journey to the ends of the Earth to save each other. From the acclaimed author of Lotería comes a heartfelt story rooted in Mexican magical realism.
Ten-year-old Lola has always been touched by magic. In her Mexico City home, built around a towering tree, she is accustomed to enchanted blooms that change with the seasons, a sandbox that spits out mysterious treasures, and mischievous chaneques that scuttle about unseen by all but her. Magic has always been a part of her life, but now…
