You go on vacation, you fall in love. What's up with that? Maybe it has something to do with how your senses are heightened when you are in an unfamiliar place, newly open to new experiences...and new people. Authors—clever people that they are—have picked up on this marriage of travel and romance and have made it a popular theme of novels and nonfiction. Here are a selection of books from our Ultimate Travel Library in which a love story—whether transcendent or troubled—is set against a fully-realized place.
AROUND THE WORLD
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert (2006). The first third of this nonfiction book celebrates Gilbert's love affair with Roman food and restaurants; a funny and poignant portrait of the city's vaunted gastronomy.
AFRICA
Botswana
Mating, by Norman Rush (1992). In this National Book Award-winning novel, a self-regarding American anthropologist falls for the (white, male) leader of a utopian village for disenfranchised women in Botswana. The village may be fictional but Rush's descriptions of the Kalahari and rural villages are frank and insightful.
Kenya
Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen (1937). This is the beguiling story of a Danish woman's life managing a coffee plantation in Kenya from 1914 to 1931. The book is vastly more colorful and engaging than the movie.
ASIA
China
Waiting, by Ha Jin (1999). Winner of a National Book Award in fiction, Ha Jin's second novel tells the story of Lin Kong, a Chinese military doctor in an arranged marriage. The doctor falls in love with a nurse at the hospital where he works, but—under the Communist government's rules—has to wait 18 years before he is free to marry again. This love story paints a portrait of daily life in provincial China.
India
The Twentieth Wife: A Novel, by Indu Sundaresan (2002). Step inside the lush, lavish imperial harem of the Mughal Empire as empress-to-be Mehrunissa falls in love with Crown Price Salim. Sundaresan's descriptions of 17th-century Mughal India are heady and overwhelming.
Japan
The Commoner, by John Burnham Schwartz (2008). Love's mettle is tested against implacable centuries of Japanese tradition in this novel set in post-war Japan and inspired by the life of Empress Michiko, the first commoner to marry into the imperial family.
Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden (1997). Arthur Golden has degrees in both Japanese art and history, and spent almost a decade researching geisha culture to write this best-selling first novel. Set in Kyoto, in the geisha district of Gion, Golden's novel is rich with delicate details—the pouring of sake, elaborate kimonos, and graceful social maneuvers—that transport the reader to the Japan of ages past.
Vietnam
No Man's Land: A Novel, by Duong Thu Huong (2005). Dealing with life in post-war central Vietnam, this not-quite-romance by a famed dissident writer focuses on the choice a woman must make between her current husband and the one she thought died during the war.
Over the Moat, by James Sullivan (2004). Biking from Saigon to Hanoi, Sullivan makes a stop in Hue and meets a beautiful Vietnamese shop girl who lives over a moat and within the walls of Vietnam's old imperial capital. Despite cultural differences and the lobbying of other suitors for Thuy's hand, their true-life romance unfolds across villa courtyards, exquisite meals, and leisurely bike rides.
AUSTRALIA AND THE PACIFIC
French Polynesia
Breadfruit, by Célestine Hitiura Vaite (2000). Life is good on the island of Tahiti for professional cleaner Materena Mahi, her man, Pito, and their three kids—until Pito comes home drunk one day and proposes marriage. This sets Materena off in a flurry of wedding plans, involving her large and voluble clan—despite the fact that Pito has since sobered up and gotten cold feet. This warm and humorous debut novel by Tahiti-born Vaite won the 2004 Prix Litteraire Des Étudiants and is part of a trilogy starring Materena that's full of the flavor of contemporary life in French Polynesia.
New Zealand
The Bone People, by Keri Hulme (1983). With characters Hulme pulls from real-life experiences and a dream she had when she was 18, this novel takes readers deep into the heart of New Zealand, a nation still plagued by colonialism. Hulme weaves Maori heritage and history into this gripping tale of love, death, and redemption.
CARIBBEAN
Guyana
The Ventriloquist's Tale, by Pauline Melville (1999). English scholar Rosa Mendelson travels to contemporary Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, to retrace the voyage of novelist Evelyn Waugh. Soon, she embarks on a steamy, forbidden romance with a local half-Indian, half-Scot cattle rancher. Their illicit relationship echoes another doomed and incestuous affair that takes place in the 1920s. Melville brilliantly jumps from past to present, weaving these dual romances together with native folklore and Guyanese history in a story that won Britain's prestigious Whitbread First Novel Award.
SOUTH AMERICA
Paraguay
The News From Paraguay, by Lily Tuck (2004). This National Book Award Winner is an exhaustively researched work of historical fiction that traces the 19th-century love affair between Irish beauty Ella Lynch and Paraguay's infamous dictator Francisco (Franco) Solano Lopez. After meeting in Europe, the pair sail to Paraguay's capital, Asunción, where, as Ella learns, the women smoke cigars. She bears five sons as her lover sets about making war, taking mistresses, and living extravagantly as the country descends into ruins.
EASTERN EUROPE
Czech Republic
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera (1984). The hollowness of life inside communist-era Prague echoes in the love triangle at the center of Kundera's philosophical modern classic, set against the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Latvia
The Beauty of History, by Viivi Luik (1991). It's 1968, Soviet tanks are moving in to crush the Prague Spring, and a young hippy Estonian woman takes the train to visit her Jewish artist lover in his hometown of Riga, in neighboring Latvia. Their love story plays out against the backdrop of unfolding larger political events in this lyrical novel.
MIDDLE EAST
Israel
Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems, by Yehuda Amichai (1992). "I remember that the city was divided/Not only between me and you/When we lived there together," writes Amichai, one of Israel's leading poets, in this collection.
Shira, by Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1971). The Israeli Nobel prize laureate's novel tells the story of an adulterous relationship between an educated German immigrant and a Jerusalem-born nurse in 1930s Jerusalem.
United Arab Emirates
Coffee and Dates, edited by Shihab Ghanem (2007). This anthology of Emirati poetry and short stories touches on a gamut of topics from love and marriage to the loss of traditional life.
NORTH AMERICA
U.S.
Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell (1936). Tara—Scarlett O'Hara's fictional childhood home—may be the place most strongly associated with Mitchell's Civil War epic, but the bulk of the action takes place in Atlanta, the author's birthplace. Scarlett moves to Atlanta's Peachtree Street as a war widow and lives through its siege, bombardment, burning, and reconstruction.
The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (2003). A man time-travels to different periods in his own life in this unusual love story set in Chicago's Newberry Library.
Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson (1994). Centered around the murder trial of a Japanese fisherman on a small island in Puget Sound, Guterson's debut novel deals with lingering bitterness and racism in the aftermath of World War II. Forests of stately cedars shrouded in mist serve as the haunting backdrop for this page-turning mystery that travels back in time to reveal the truth about war and loss.
WESTERN EUROPE
France
A Gift from Brittany, by Marjorie Price (2008). In this memoir, American artist Price recounts her struggles and triumphs in a traditional Breton village after she meets and marries (and eventually leaves) a mercurial French painter.
Nadja, by André Breton (1928). The narrator in this surrealist masterpiece pursues an enigmatic woman through the streets of a dreamlike Paris filled with sphinxes and electric signs.
Greece
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres (1994). This war-novel-turned-movie reveals the quirks and idiosyncrasies of close-knit village life in the Greek Isles' Cephallonia during the Italian occupation of the 1940s. The novel narrates the bittersweet love triangle between a beautiful local woman, her fiancé off at war, and an Italian officer stationed in the village.
Portugal
Baltasar and Blimunda, by Jose Saramago (1987). The Inquisition, empire-building, aviation exploration—Saramago's Portugal of the 18th century is an epic canvas for big ideas. But at the heart of this rich novel is a transcendent love story between a soldier and a clairvoyant. Saramago masterfully combines actual historical figures and events with magical fiction.
Wales
The Welsh Girl, by Peter Ho Davies (2007). In the last months of World War II, a quiet village in northern Wales is changed by the arrival of German prisoners of war to a camp set up by the British. In this compelling novel, Welsh antagonism to the English guards adds to the mix as a bittersweet romance develops between the daughter of a sheep farmer and a young German POW.