Stamp Your Literary Passport: 7 Great Books to Take You Around the World

For three centuries, the indigenous people of Vancouver Island, Canada, told the story of a magical tree that grew out of the ruin—a golden Sitka spruce. In 1997, a misguided environmental protest killed the spruce, setting in motion a tragic and gripping story of politics and desire.

One part a long and loving meditation into the beauty and the brutality that is Sicily, and one part a true-crime thriller, Australian author Peter Robb maps the connections among the crumbling palazzi of Palermo, the sordid history of Italian politics, and the mafia creed at the heart of “La Cosa Nostra”—“our thing.”

Originally written in Basque, this novel loses nothing in translation. Set in the Belgian Congo around 1903, it is the story of two warped but compelling love stories. One is the story of a new colonial recruit’s fascination with a beautiful African girl whom his commander wishes to rape. The other is the story of the commander and his wife, whose homes in France fuel this distant tragedy.

A brilliant Scandinavian noir thriller by Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen, PURGE is set during the early 1990s, in the first year following the liberation of Estonia from decades of Soviet occupation. In it, a young woman flees organized Russian crime and sexual slavery and returns to the rural farm where her grandmother and great-aunt have buried a dangerous family secret.

THE SHAPE OF WATER is one of the wittiest of the always-superb Montalbano series by Italian author Andrea Camilleri. He manages to swing from rollicking dark comedy to wry tenderness, all the while crafting one of the best detectives in contemporary literature and writing what is arguably the best introduction to Sicily out there.

Set in picturesque Bath, England, it’s a marvel that Peter Lovesey’s cleverly plotted detective novels featuring investigator Peter Diamond haven’t yet been turned into a BBC television series. Reminiscent of the novels of Agatha Christie, UPON A DARK NIGHT is one of the most classically perfect of the series: two seemingly unconnected murders drawn together by a thread that tightens.

A surprisingly urgent and luminous novel by German author Daniel Kehlmann about the shared South American journey of geographer Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician Carl Gauss, each consumed with private dreams of what it might mean to symbolize and map the limits of knowledge and our world.