A truism about stories (courtesy, more or less, of the novelist John Gardner) is that there are only two plots: a person goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. The joke is that they’re the same story, from two different perspectives. In the first half of 2025, I’ve found that my favorite books have lived up to the claim.
The best books I’ve read so far have all been preoccupied with the problem of travel, of leaving home, of being visited by strangers: how it broadens us and how it damages us, its attractions and its horrors. They are about how frightening it can be to enter a strange new place, and how frightening it can be when a stranger enters the familiar place we’ve known all our lives.
In the books I’m going to tell you about, a married couple is stranded on a life raft for four months. A spinsterish aunt leaves home to become a witch. And a woman sexually attracted to airplanes travels from one airport to the next, searching for the plane that will marry her.
For your convenience, I’ve further divided these books about our fair travelers into two categories: the whimsical and the arduous. (There’s overlap, of course, because how interesting can whimsy be if there isn’t a touch of work to make it worthwhile? And how can anyone make it through unrelenting toil without a dash of whimsy?) These should help guide you to the perfect book to accompany you on your summer travels. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.
Books in which homebodies go on whimsical journeys
Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski
In this deceptively warm comedy, a middle-aged Shakespearean actress who is a tad high and a lot anxious spends Thanksgiving Day roaming the streets of New York City, her little dog in tow. Profane, self-indulgent, and conflicted over the recent cancellation of her disgraced mentor, Mona Zahad is indeed acting out.
Although, speaking of self-indulgence, the mentor in question writes to Mona: “I am dying, Egypt, dying,” scrawled on a postcard that pictures Mona in character as Lady Macbeth, covered in blood. The missive, from the theatrical director Milton Katz, prompts Mona to begin her walkabout.
Milton discovered Mona, but he’s been fired for sexual harassment. Officially, Mona’s on Milton’s side: after all, he’d never hidden the fact that the price of working with him was to put up with a little unsolicited handsiness. Unofficially, Mona can’t help noticing that she’s become a more relaxed and dynamic actress since Milton was drummed out. She knows that Milton has re-invented himself as a martyr, and she can’t decide whether she wants to be a part of that martyrdom or not.
Reeling from pills and emotional foment, Mona stumbles her way down the length of Manhattan, quoting Shakespeare to herself as she goes. Mona Acts Out is the only Me Too novel I have yet to read that’s both sweet and sophisticated, an alchemical combination it must have borrowed from the Bard himself.
Read if you: have a favorite Kenneth Branagh-directed Shakespeare and are still a little bitter he never did cast Judi Dench in one of the plays.
Michael Lincoln, the hapless narrator of this metafictional romp, spends most of the events of Metallic Realms holed up in the Brooklyn apartment his parents pay for, eavesdropping on his roommate through a hidden microphone stashed in a house plant. But Mike is telling us his story from an undisclosed location somewhere in upstate New York. As we learn more about nerdy, awkward Mike — “deeply introverted, Sagittarius sun and Libra rising, Ravenclaw, Water Tribe citizen, lawful neutral, and an INTP” — it becomes clear that it would take a real tragedy to get him that far away from home.
Mike, Michel’s funhouse alter ego, is a classic geek fanboy, unable to mention the object of his obsessions without making bombastic claims about how it has “shattered the calcified worldbuilding paradigm that dominates science fiction.” In this case, however, Mike is hyperfixated on the deeply mediocre science fiction that his roommate’s writing collective, Orb 4, has been churning out for fun. They’ve denied Mike entry into the collective, so he’s appointed himself lore keeper instead. (The rest of the group doesn’t know that he believes his role requires complete records of their meetings; hence that hidden mic.)
It’s a tragedy, a story about the grinding miseries and disappointments of trying to build a life that leaves you room to be creative and make art.
Michel has described Metallic Realms as “Pale Fire meets Star Trek,” and the Nabokovian comparisons aren’t off-base. According to Mike, what we’re reading is the collective work of Orb 4, interspersed with annotations and historical context from Mike in his capacity as lore keeper. Mike’s commentary, however, lets us in on a bigger story behind his pompous bloviating and creepy stalking. It’s a tragedy, a story about the grinding miseries and disappointments of trying to build a life that leaves you room to be creative and make art. Even if the art you create is, to all but the most biased possible observer, never more than just okay.
Read alongside: Pale Fire for the structure, Vladimir for the Nabokov pastiche, and Among Others for the heart.
Woodworking by Emily St. James
In Woodworking, the debut novel by former Vox critic Emily St. James, leaving home is the dream, the impossible ideal. To leave one’s old life and parents behind, reinvent oneself, and move to a new city where no one can ever say you were anyone different, like moving out for college but with no Thanksgiving homecoming.
In the case of Woodworking’s two narrators, Erica and Abigail, the dream specifically is to move to a new city where no one will ever know that they’re trans. For Erica, a high school English teacher, the dream feels impossible: she’s already built a whole life as a man in small-town South Dakota, complete with an ex-wife she’s still in love with. For 17-year-old Abigail, Erica’s student and the only out trans person she knows, the dream feels tantalizingly close. Abigail already hates her parents anyway, so what’s one more level of estrangement?
Woodworking is a charming, sparkling, and very human novel that packs a heavy punch. Its heart and soul lies with the vexed relationship between Erica and Abigail, forced into alliance after Erica comes out to Abigail and Abigail, horrified, realizes she’s going to have to be her dorky English teacher’s trans mentor and teach her how to paint her fingernails. This book is a hoot and a ride.
Read accompanied by: Something fizzy and sweet with a little bitter kick in the background. Blood orange San Pellegrino, maybe?
Went to London, Took the Dog: A Diary by Nina Stibbe
The memoirist and novelist Nina Stibbe first arrived in London in the 1980s as a bright-eyed 20-year-old nanny. Her time caring for the children of a London Review of Books editor left her enmeshed in the literary scene of the moment, and the letters she wrote her sister about brushing shoulders with the bookish who’s who became the basis of her 2013 bestseller, Love, Nina.
In her new memoir Went to London, Took the Dog, Stibbe returns to London as a 60-year-old for a year-long sabbatical from her regular life in Cornwall. She plans to write her diary, she announces, in the style of celebrity playwright Alan Bennett: “He just writes what he’s been up to. Say he’s had Ian McEwan over for tea …”
Snoops rejoice: she does name names.
Accordingly, Stibbe takes us to pub trivia with Nicholas Hornby and discusses the dishwashing abilities of her landlady, the novelist Deborah Moggach. Hilariously, she goes out of her way to sideswipe the notorious contrarian novelist Lionel Shriver. (Stibbe speaks at the same literary festival as Shriver and takes great care not to be caught alone at breakfast with her.) And all the perimenopause discourse around All Fours last summer should meet Stibbe’s accounts of prolapsed uteri and menopause-induced incontinence. Snoops rejoice: she does name names.
Every so often, however, Stibbe allows us a peek at what drove her back to London. It’s a trial separation from her husband, whom she never mentions by name. Likewise, she never tells us what, exactly, the problem is with her marriage, only that her coupled-up friends act “as if I’m going to infect their marriage,” and that “sometimes I must forget to breathe or something and have a terrible headache afterward.” Then the diary entry ends, and she moves on, as breezy as though she had never made such a deeply sad revelation, to the next day’s lunch meeting with Hornby and plumbing travails with Moggach.
Read accompanied by: good crunchy salt-and-vinegar potato chips, for an easy, addictive pleasure.
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
For a certain type of reader, among whom I count myself, Lolly Willowes will be a nearly perfect novel. First published in 1926 amid an England unsure of what to do with its newly-liberated women, and reissued this year by Modern Library, it tells the story of Laura “Aunt Lolly” Willowes and her decision to become a witch.
Selling her soul to Satan, Laura concludes, feels like a much better move than spending her whole life making herself useful to an unending stream of children.
Laura is a decorous spinster who, in middle age, decides she is fed up with taking care of her family and moves away to a village by the woods. There, Laura makes the acquaintance of a supernatural cat and witnesses a macabre black Sabbath with a coven of witches. Selling her soul to Satan, Laura concludes, feels like a much better move than spending her whole life making herself useful to an unending stream of children.
Lolly Willowes presents itself to the reader with all the placid charm of a comic English country novel, a Cold Comfort Farm or a Love In a Cold Climate. Yet its pleasantly arch, witty voice is hiding a deep well of fury. “The one thing all women hate,” Laura tells Satan, “is to be thought dull” — yet Laura’s whole life is a series of dull, mean contrivances, built for her by other people. A little bit of witchcraft of her own volition does her good.
Read if you: wish the Mitford sisters had written something a little more queer; have been known to mess with Tarot cards; go wild for a walk in an autumnal forest.
Books in which the journey is harrowing
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
To say that Dream Count is probably the weakest of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels is less an indictment of Dream Count than it is a recognition of how high she’s set the bar. From Adichie, even a minor effort is worth a read.
Dream Count tells the story of four women, all from Nigeria, all either currently living in the US or having recently returned to Nigeria from the US. Stranded in the early desultory days of the pandemic, they begin going back over their relationships with the (mostly terrible) men they have known — their “dream count,” says one.
Much of Dream Count is satirical, and Adichie is at her sharpest and most biting when dealing with the flummoxed reactions of white liberal Americans to wealthy, cosmopolitan Africans. “They can’t stand rich people from poor countries because it means they can’t feel sorry for you,” remarks Omelogor, who hates America and moves straight back to Lagos.
There’s a jarring tonal shift, however, when Adichie delves into the mind of Kadiatou, the only poor woman among her four protagonists. Kadiatou’s story is based on the account of Nafissatou Diallo, a hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted assault in 2011. Adichie writes Kadiatou with a touching, at times reductive naivete — but what becomes deeply moving is the relationship Kadiatou develops with the other three women of this novel. America may not know what to do with African women of such disparate yet overlapping backgrounds, but they understand one another.
Read if you: want to remind yourself that before that viral TED Talk and Beyoncé sample, Adichie was also a very good novelist.
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst
In 1972, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a real-life British couple, set sail in the little yacht into which they had sunk all their life savings. Obsessed with the idea of escaping the suburbs and exploring the wilderness, they planned to make their way from England to New Zealand. Instead, nearly a year into their voyage, their boat sank.
The Baileys found themselves stranded on their tiny inflatable rubber raft, along with the few supplies they’d managed to salvage: fresh water, canned food, a biography of Richard III. There they would remain, surviving against all odds, for the next four months.
The story of the Baileys became a media sensation after they were eventually recovered, but it has long since faded from the collective memory. In this elegant and electric account, journalist Sophie Elmhirst reconstructs every day of their four-month ordeal, and the blistering aftermath of their eventual rescue.
Surrounded by far more wilderness than they ever counted on, the Baileys caught fish and sea turtles, tried and failed to signal to passing ships, and read every line of that damn biography over and over again. The book, optimistic Maralyn tells fatalist Maurice, will form the basis of their library once they get home.
In Elmhurst’s hands, the story of the Baileys’ ordeal becomes a portrait of a marriage: how two people can drive each other to the edges of despair, and how they can keep each other alive in a time of almost unimaginable horror.
I galloped through it in a single night. You will too.
Read accompanied by: plentiful supplies to gloat over as the Baileys’ condition gets worse and worse. Imagine you’re a kid reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s worst winter again, and go from there.
Susan Choi’s last book, 2019’s Trust Exercise, was a structural triumph, so fine and precise it cut like a knife. Flashlight, her new novel, is a looser, less showy affair. It creeps up on you, so you don’t quite register how deeply it’s gotten its hooks in you until days later, when you’re still thinking about it.
Flashlight begins with a girl and her father on the Japanese beach at twilight, heading out to look at the stars. The girl, American-born Louisa, is a precocious 10-year-old. Her father, Serk, is a Japanese-born Korean man who is almost always angry. A day after they go star-watching, Louisa is found unconscious on the shore. Serk is lost and presumed dead, his body never recovered.
Part of the deep pleasure of Flashlight is how finely Choi renders the mind of Louisa, who soon finds herself to be, like her father before her, always angry. Louisa is filled with rage at the adults around her: her teachers, who she considers stupid and incompetent; the school psychiatrist, who isn’t smart enough to understand her; most of all her disabled mother, whom Louisa believes to be a liar and a malingerer. Louisa is angry in the way of a child: betrayed by the adults who have failed to live up to the expectations she set for them. And as Louisa grows into a fraught, uneasy adulthood, we see how her child’s rage continues to shape her psyche in ways that she herself observes with surprise and confusion.
Read alongside: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910–1945
The narrator of Kate Folk’s sly, clever Sky Daddy presents her problem to readers on the first page. “This was my destiny,” candid Linda says, with characteristic transparency: “for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate midflight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.”
Linda is sexually attracted to planes. She believes the only way to marry one is to die in a plane crash. With that simple equation in mind, she devotes her paltry salary to taking as many plane trips as she can; mostly regional ones, to nearby midsize cities. Nevertheless, none of the “fine gentlemen” who woo her on each flight has yet taken her to be his bride. Desperate, Linda starts exploring the world of vision boarding to see if it can bring her closer to her destiny.
There is a version of Sky Daddy that treats Linda as an object of malicious fun, but Folk never stoops so low. She takes Linda completely seriously: Linda, after all, has devoted her life to the pursuit of love, accepting the prospect of her own self-destruction with steely equanimity. Linda is part Ahab, part Ishmael, and her white whale is the first plane she ever fell in love with. This is a strange and tender novel, and it has lingered in my mind for months.
Read if you: feel Elinor Oliphant Is Completely Fine would have benefited from being weirder, or Moby-Dick would have benefited from more sex.
