The most interesting travel stories are usually not about the destination but about the journey, and the experiences portrayed in the following adventures make fascinating reading indeed.
Whether or not travel to a real exotic location is part of your summer plans, these titles provide a great escape:
–– This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich.
Lured by the silence and the darkness of this almost untouched place, the author spent seven chilling seasons discovering Greenland’s vast landscape and hardy people, the Inuit.
Her months-long hunting trips by dogsled reveal her love of the outdoors and sometimes challenge her innermost emotions.
–– A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz.
In this fictional, transformative journey, Jasper Dean’s quest for self-identity takes him from the Australian outback to Parisian cafes, from the jungles of Thailand to mental institutions to the criminal underground.
Raised by a wildly inventive father absorbed in a losing battle to create a lasting impression on the world, Jasper, who once thought himself a casualty of his father’s whims, comes to realize his childhood was also one of unparalleled grand adventure.
–– Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.
In this first volume of an expected trilogy set in the 19th century, hardened sailors, hopeless stowaways, and a mishmash of convicts, all of varied races, make up the crew of the Ibis, an immense ship sailing across the Indian Ocean to fight in the Opium Wars.
–– The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig.
Drawing on an actual event, the author tells the story of four Scandinavian indentured servants who in 1853 steal a canoe from their Russian work camp.
They leave the shores of New Archangel (now Sitka, Alaska) and launch themselves toward Oregon powered only by the current and their own rowing.
–– The Mapmaker’s Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder and Survival in the Amazon by Robert Whitaker.
This relatively unknown, but astonishing survival story is that of Isabel Grameson’s South American trek in 1769, who traveled across the Andes and down the Amazon to reunite with her husband, cartographer Jean Godin, whom she had not seen in 20 years.
Journalist Whitaker draws on the original records of French mapmakers and Peruvian witness accounts to tell this amazing tale.
–– Places in Between by Rory Stewart.
In an equally amazing journey, Stewart recounts how, beginning in January 2002, he walked across war-ravaged Afghanistan. Many other journalists have died from the hazards he encountered while crossing mountains covered in nine feet of snow and searching for a place to stay in Taliban-devastated towns, but Stewart was lucky every time he was welcomed into a villager’s home.
Through his encounters with village patriarchs and Taliban officials and descriptions of the beautiful landscape he trod, Stewart reveals a country still largely unknown to most readers.
–– Parts of this column originally appeared in Library Journal.
Maureen Curry is the chief librarian at the Vernon branch of the Okanagan Regional Library. Her column, Off the Shelf, appears every second Sunday in The Morning Star.
