At heart, this is a love story -- of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery always eluded her. Seeking full immersion, she decides to move to Rome with her family, for "a...

"Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who upends Macon's insular world--and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life."--Publisher.

"Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, a true classic and one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and rental car and on foot, to see what has changed -- and what hasn't. Following a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis in the south to Cape Wrath in the...

"Sparked by long-forgotten gifts and memorabilia discovered in an old trunk, the now ninety-year-old Hill reminisces about private moments, shared laughs, and crazy adventures with one of the world's most iconic women during her time as First Lady and the excruciating year following the assassination of her husband. After all, he notes that "when you travel with someone...you experience things that can't be fully appreciated by anyone who wasn't there""--...

"In Bowing to Elephants, a woman seeking love and authenticity comes to understand herself as a citizen of the world through decades of wandering the globe. During her travels she sees herself more clearly as she gazes into the feathery eyes of a 14,000-pound African elephant and looks for answers to old questions in Vietnam and the tragically ravaged landscape of Cambodia."--Amazon.com.

"With humor and the biting insight of a native, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower explores the history, culture, and politics of Texas, while holding the stereotypes up for rigorous scrutiny"-- "God Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America. It is a red state in the heart of Trumpland that hasn't elected a Democrat to a statewide office in more than twenty years; but it is also a state in which minorities...

Since the days of Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. In 1940, journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City -- but then committed suicide without revealing its location. In 2012, Preston joined a team of scientists using classified...