Books that Span Multiple Continents

Book Summary

Nuri and his wife, Afra, live in the beautiful city of Aleppo, Syria. They have a great life as a beekeeper and an artist, until war comes to their doorstep. Like so many others, Nuri and Afra are forced onto the Syrian refugee trail. They travel through Turkey and Greece, even though Afra has been blinded, making their journey even more harrowing. The couple slowly works their way toward a cousin in Britain who has already started a beekeeping course for fellow refugees. 

The author’s volunteer work with refugees gave her the background to write the realistic tale. While the book is often heartbreaking, it also includes messages of hope of love.

Book Summary

When a colorful mailer arrived from the Notre Dame Alumni Association advertising a tour of some of the earth’s most exotic locations, Nicolas Sparks was busy with a book deadline on top of a hectic family life with five children. However, he kept thinking about the trip and had an idea. 

In January 2003, Nicholas set off on the trip with his brother. Only one year apart, the brothers were the only surviving members of their family. As they visited the wonders of the world, daredevil Micah and introspective Nicholas had a rare chance to escape daily life and focus on new adventures and childhood tragedies as they discovered truths about loss, love, and hope.

Book Summary

As a child in an abusive houshold, author Amanda Lindhout used National Geographic magazine as her way to mentally escape to other parts of the world. At 19, she worked as a cocktail waitress, aggressively saving to visit the locations she had been dreaming of her entire life. But, unlike other teens who dream of backpacking through Europe, she had more dangerous sites in mind, even working as a TV reporter during her time in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

In 2008, she took her journey to Somalia, where she was kidnapped on her 4th day in the country. For the next 460 days, she was held hostage. Her tale is harrowing and intense, and you may find yourself confused as to how she survived to write her story of compassion and perseverance.

Book Summary

As Presidental Secret Service Agent turned author Clint Hill turned 90, he prepared to sell his home. As part of the process, he found an old steamer trunk in the garage. Once it was pried open, Hill uncovered mementos that hadn’t been seen in over 50 years. From handwritten notes and photographs to personal gifts from trips with Mrs. Kennedy, the truck contained a treasure trove of memories. 

This newly released non-fiction title gathers those memories into a heartwarming recounting of their travels around the world together. From humor and adventure to sorrow in the months following President Kennedy’s assassination, this book is even more candid and personal than his earlier books about his time with Mrs. Kennedy.

Book Summary

Spanning much of the 18th & 19th centuries, this book tells the story of the fictional Whittaker family. The patriarch, Henry, begins life as a poor Englishman before making his fortune in South America. He rises to be the wealthiest man in Philadelphia.

His daughter, Alma, gets his money and his great mind. She becomes a botanist who studies the mysteries of evolution while falling in love with a man obsessed with the spiritual realm. She is scientific while he’s an artist. Follow this unlikely couple as their story soars around the globe.

Book Summary

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Ethiopia. Unfortunately, their mother dies in childbirth and their father disappears, leaving the brothers orphaned.

The twins are adopted by two other surgeons from the hospital and come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, but it’s love rather than politics that comes between them.

After finishing med school, Marion flees to America to intern at an overcrowded and underfunded hospital in NYC. Eventually, the past catches up with Marion. He must turn to the two men he trusts least – his father and his brother.

Book Summary

This festive, funny, and heartwarming Christmas novel is the perfect Hallmark-style armchair travel read that balances friendship and romance! Chloe, Jules, and Lucy met on vacation as kids. They’ve been best friends ever since, despite living on three different continents.

Twenty-two years later, they decide to swap homes for Christmas… Lucy travels to snowy Breckenridge, Colorado; Jules escapes down under for a summery Christmas in Melbourne, Australia; and Chloe travels halfway around the world for a quiet holiday in a quaint English village.

Book Summary

Maggie Downs was an award-winning newspaper journalist, but she didn’t have a long bucket list of travel destinations. Traveling was her mom’s dream. As a child, Maggie doubted she’d ever have the courage to travel to the destinations her mom hoped to one day see, but her mom would always insist: “You’re braver than you think you are.”

When Maggie’s mom was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, Maggie quit her job and set out to fulfill her mother’s bucket list. Along the way, she learned to make every moment count. Over the course of one year, she lost a parent while discovering the world.

Book Summary

This novel is about four women who began their friendship during college in Bombay in the 1970s. Initially drawn together by their revolutionary fervor, the friends drift apart over the next 30 years as their lives take very different paths. One married an American, while another was caught in a repressive marriage and forced to wear a burka.

Through their stories, the author paints a portrait of India from the 1970s through the early 2010s. Ultimately, the four friends are reunited when one of them falls gravely ill and requests to see her friends together one last time.

Book Summary

Written by the long-time director and producer of Anthony Bourdain’s travel food show, In the Weeds takes you on an adventure around the world. They filmed in dangerous locations, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Iran.

The book covers what it was like to be on this journey, and how they managed to film in areas so hard for Westerners to visit. There’s a focus on what it was like traveling with Bourdain, on and off-camera.

Book Summary

Georgia has it all from the outside. She’s a wife, mother, and successful neurosurgeon in London and has been named the first female Director of her department. However, when her daughter Lara starts insisting on more information about her biological father, Georgia’s mostly under-control anxiety attacks return in full force. 

Because Georgia’s memories of that portion of life are so repressed, she doesn’t know the answers to Lara’s questions. When therapy fails, she heads to across the sea to New Orleans where she met Lara’s father, and then to the small island in New Zealand where he died. Will she be able to piece together her own history and hold her family together?

Book Summary

Based on a true story, this novel will transport you to two vastly different time periods and locations. In 1939 Paris, Odile worked for the American Library. When Nazis arrive in Paris and threaten the library, Odile and her fellow brave librarians join the resistance.

Forty-three years later, in Montana, teenager Lily becomes interested in her widowed neighbor. As they begin to form a bond, Lily tries to learn more about how her French neighbor ended up in Montana. They have no idea that a dark secret connects them.

Book Summary

Despite the title, this book spans a full year and will whisk you through three of the world’s most glamorous cities: New York, London, and Paris. Christmas only plays a very small role in the overall story.

Cassie married young and now, ten years later, with a failed marriage and no career, she needs to find herself again. She leaves her quiet life in Scotland to travel for a year, staying with her best friends as she tries on each of their cities for size. Left to her own devices, Cassie is a jeans and sweaters kind of woman, but as she explores life in each of these glamorous cities, she puts herself in her friends’ hands. From hair and makeup to wardrobes and diets, they try to mold Cassie in their images. But before her globetrotting ends, she’ll have to find what makes her happy outside of anyone else’s expectations.

During her four months in Paris, a lot of Cassie’s experiences reminded us of Emily in Paris. Cassie takes on a challenging job in the world of high-fashion, explores the city, and discovers French cooking from a chef who takes her under his wing.

Book Summary

This epic story of love, hatred, war, and revolution begins in 1911 on the Coronation Day of King George V. The timeline continues up to and through the major events of WW1.

The complex plot of this nearly 1,000-page epic includes many intertwined characters, including a Welsh coal-mining family, the aristocratic coal-mine owners, a spy at the German Embassy in London, an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and two orphaned Russian brothers. Book two in the series, Winter of the World, picks right up with the same families and follows them through WW2.

Book Summary

They say that behind every great love song is a great love story, but this is the story of song that winds its way around the world, telling more than one love story.

Concert pianist Diana has long been engaged to Arie. The two are finally ready to marry, but not until Diana returns home to Australia from her world tour. While on tour, she composes a love song for Arie. 

Late one night, her love song is overheard. Tragedy strikes before Diana can play it for Arie, but the song is already on its own journey across the world.

In Scotland, Evie has been drifting for years since leaving Australia with a dream of becoming a poet. Now she spends her days making coffee, her nights serving beer, and she questions her relationship with her boyfriend. 

Then one day, through a twist of fate, she hears an exquisite love song… Diana’s love song that has been passed from musician to musician. Will this song ultimately bring two lost souls together?

Book Summary

This novel begins during the Spanish Civil War. When Franco succeeds in overthrowing the government, thousands flee to the French border, including Roser, a pregnant young widow, and Victor, an army doctor and brother of Roser’s deceased love. In order to improve their chances of survival, Roser and Victor must marry despite neither wishing to do so.

Together with thousands of other refugees, they board the SS Winnipeg bound for Chile, leaving behind a Europe erupting in WWII. While starting over on another continent, both hold onto hope that they’ll be able to return to Spain one day. But as they witness the battle between freedom and repression across the globe, Roser and Victor discover that home is closer than they thought.