There's No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the American South by Gary Younge. Beginning in 1961, the Freedom Riders traveled through the American South, challenging illegal racial segregation. In 1997, Younge, a black British journalist, retraces their route.

Diary by Witold Gombrowicz. In 1939, the avant-garde Polish author traveled to Argentina, where he got stuck during World War II. After the war ended, he decided against returning to Poland and remained in Argentina until the 1960s. His diaries recount his life in Argentina, his thoughts on exile and expat life, and his commentaries on literature.

An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie. A book can launch the journey of a lifetime. As a teenager in Togo, Kpomassie read a book about Greenland and determined to go there. He spent the next eight years working his way through Africa and Europe to get to Greenland, where he lived with the Inuit.

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford. Born into an English aristocratic family, Mitford eloped with one of Winston Churchill’s nephews to help fight the Spanish Civil War. After her husband’s death in WWII, she moved to the United States, remarried, became a communist, and wrote exposes of the American funeral and prison industries.

The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America by Mike McIntyre. A journalist who has always been a "giver" travels across America without money, forcing himself to rely on strangers to survive. On his first day, he meets a guy just released from jail, who offers his only food—two gumdrops, and the generosity continues from there. Although he also meets a few loony-bin-crazy types along the way too, this book restores one’s faith in Americans.

The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood by Hugo Hamilton. With a German mother and an Irish father, who wants them all to be a model nationalist family, the author has a hard time growing up normal in post-WWII Dublin—especially when the local kids taunt him with Nazi slogans.

Prague by Arthur Phillips. Dead-on and humorous portrayal of expat life in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s—the jobs, the friends, the zeitgeist, and the certainty that Prague is where it's at, so what am I doing in Budapest?

The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook by Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude Stein may have thought people came to her Paris salon for the conversation, but they probably really came for the food prepared by Toklas. Famous for its recipe for Hashish Fudge, the book also lets you know what Picasso, Matisse, and Hemingway were served.

The Red Passport: Stories by Katherine Shonk. Toxic vegetables, Chechen rebels, trusting Americans, Dunkin’ Donuts, and journalists with an agenda all play a role in these tales of locals and expats trying to survive and understand post-Communist Russia.

A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed. Ahmed grew up in Egypt, went to school in England, and taught in the United Arab Emirates before coming to the United States. In beautifully rich language, she tackles what it means to live where location and politics constantly force us to reassess our place in the world.

The Adventures of Ibn Battuta by Ross E. Dunn. You think you’ve got the travel bug? In 1325, Ibn Battuta left Morocco for the hajj to Mecca. He enjoyed traveling so much that it took him almost thirty years to get back home. During that time, he traveled all over the Muslim world—China, India, Turkey, Asia, and Africa while recording his impressions, adventures, and travails.

When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant. In 1946, Evelyn Sert leaves Britain for Israel. After barely surviving life on a kibbutz, she moves to Tel Aviv and becomes a hairdresser. Posing as a British policeman’s wife, she unknowingly passes on information about her foreign clients’ families to her lover who is a member of Irgun, a group fighting to end the British Mandate.

Yemen: The Unknown Arabia by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. He went to Yemen in 1982 to study Arabic and never returned home. A great read—from history to politics to life in the desert to the culture of chewing qat—Mackintosh-Smith offers readers a window view to a country most of us will probably never visit.

A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer. At seventeen, Hillela, a Jewish girl in South Africa, is thrown out of her family. Through a series of relationships, she becomes casually and then actively involved in African nationalist movements, which takes her all over Africa, to Eastern Europe, and to the United States.

Rules of the Wild by Francesca Marciano. Esme, an Italian woman searching for a place to call home, ends up in Kenya and becomes involved with two men. One is a safari guide who introduces her to the beauty of Africa and its commodification by tourists, and the other is a journalist outraged by Somalia and Rwanda.

My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience by Rian Malan. Admittedly, we tend to stay away from books that make us think too hard late at night, but this memoir is well worth reading into the wee hours. Malan doesn’t indulge in self-promotion and his brutal honesty about his own foibles makes him a trustworthy chronicler of South Africa’s troubled past.

Foreign Babes in Beijing by Rachel Dewoskin. In 1994, you decide to move to Beijing. You have an office job but then one day you decide, on a lark, to audition for a part on a Chinese soap opera. You get the role of the foreign vixen. The show's a hit, and your life changes dramatically.

Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure by Sarah Macdonald. After a hellish backpacking trip around India, Macdonald vows she’ll never be back. But ten years later and in love with an ABC correspondent stationed there, she returns. While her honey is off reporting, she embarks on a tour of religion and mysticism in India.

Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin. Fluent in Burmese, Larkin spends a year visiting the places Orwell lived in Burma as colonial policeman. Using his books as guides, Larkin examines the complex relationship between Orwell's Burma and today's Myanmar.

Escape From Kathmandu by Kim Stanley Robinson. No navel-gazing in this hilariously quirky novel! Two hapless friends try to help a yeti escape Kathmandu and return to the Himalayas. If you’ve been to Nepal, you’ll catch the inside jokes – like when the Yeti runs into Jimmy Carter on the stairs. (If you haven’t been to Nepal, the joke is that every guesthouse that can possibly lay claim to having hosted Jimmy on his 1985 trip does so with a “Jimmy Carter slept here!” sign. Okay, maybe it’s not really that funny out of context.)

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost. A guy and his wife move to a remote island in the South Pacific for two years. He learns two important things: island paradises are not all they’re cracked up to be and the secret of dry sex.

Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth About Reality by Brad Warner. A punk rocker moves to Japan, makes monster movies, finds a Zen master, and repaves the road to enlightenment.

My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Susan Orlean. Orlean, a writer for the The New Yorker and author of The Orchid Thief shares her world travel stories. A great book for when short pieces seem more palatable than a lengthy tome.

Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse by Brigid Keenan. This memoir will take you to Syria, Kazakhstan, Grenada, and many other countries as Keenan recalls thirty years as an expat wife. If you have ever been a diplomatic spouse, or dream of being one, this is the book for you.

Atlas of the Human Heart: A Memoir by Ariel Gore. A sixteen-year-old valley girl quits school and buys a one-way ticket to Asia. She spends three years knocking around the world before getting . . . oops! Almost gave away the ending! Although Gore has been called “Jack Kerouac’s little sister, her expert turn of a phrase and spellbinding imagery harken more toward Gabriel Garcia Marquez.


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