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.
