Literary Travel

Describes how a group of Timbuktu librarians enacted a daring plan to smuggle the city's great collection of rare Islamic manuscripts away from the threat of desctuction at the hands of Al Quaeda militants to the safety of southern Mali.

"The Aspern Papers" is the story of an unnamed narrator who travels to Venice in search of some letters by Jeffrey Aspern, a famous and now dead American poet. Inspired by a true story about a fan of the poet Shelley who sought out similar papers, The Aspern Papers is one of Henry James's more popular novellas. It is included in this volume with the following three shorter works by Henry James: "The Private Life," "The Middle Years," and "The Death...

"In his many years as a commissario, Guido Brunetti has seen all manner of crime and known intuitively how to navigate the various pathways in his native city, Venice, to discover the person responsible. Now, in Transient Desires, the thirtieth novel in Donna Leon's masterful series, he faces a heinous crime committed outside his jurisdiction. He is drawn in innocently enough: two young American women have been badly injured in a boating accident,...

"Into Oblivion, the follow-up to the gritty prequel Reykjavik Nights, gives devoted fans another glimpse of Erlendur in his early days as a young, budding detective. A woman swims in a remote, milky-blue lagoon. Steam rises from the water and as it clears, a body is revealed in the ghostly light. Miles away, a vast aircraft hangar rises behind the perimeter fence of the US military base. A sickening thud is heard as a man's body falls from a high...

"London nurse Lissie needs a change of scene; she's suffering from PTSD after witnessing a violent crime. Cormac, a rural Scotland paramedic, trades places with her. Lissie has never experienced small-town life, and Cormac is a fish out of water in London. Through email, they discover new feelings for their jobs and each other. What will happen when they meet?" --Adapted from jacket.

Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman whose scarf is found on a mysteriously built snowman, a case that is complicated by subsequent abductions and a menacing letter.

"The spectacularly dramatic memoir of a woman whose curiosity about the world led her from rural Canada to imperiled and dangerous countries on every continent, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity in Somalia--a story of courage, resilience, and extraordinary grace.At the age of eighteen, Amanda Lindhout moved from her hardscrabble Alberta hometown to the big city--Calgary--and worked as a cocktail waitress, saving her tips so she could...

"Erudite, ambitious Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the schutztruppe askari, the Germans' colonial troops; after years at war, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Hamza was not stolen, but was sold; he has come of age in the schutztruppe, at the right hand of an officer whose zeal and control have ensured his protection but marked him for life. He does not have words for how the war ended for him,...

Set in Afghanistan, this emotionally engaging first novel uses alternating chapters to weave together the story of nine-year-old Rahima and her sisters with that of their great-great-grandmother Shekiba. Both Rahima and Shekiba share the experience of participating in bacha posh, in which young girls are dressed as and treated as boys until puberty. And like Shekiba, Rahima and her two older sisters endure the difficult and often horrific experience...