Travelogues About Living Abroad

They made up their minds and started packing
Do you ever dream of cutting out for another land? These folks did...

No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach by Anthony Bourdain (641.01 BOARD)
More than just a companion to the hugely popular show, No Reservations is Bourdain’s fully illustrated journal of his far-flung travels. The book traces his trips from New Zealand to New Jersey and everywhere in between, mixing beautiful, never-before-seen photos and mementos with Bourdain’s outrageous commentary on what really happens when you give a bad-boy chef an open ticket to the world.

On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel by Tony Cohan (972.41 COHAN)
In the mid-1980s, Tony Cohan and his artist wife, Masako, decided they had had enough of the hectic pace and inherent insecurities of life in Los Angeles and made tracks for the historic town of San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico. Almost inevitably, they eventually found themselves buying a 250-year-old hacienda on the verge of collapse, with wonderfully elegant Spanish colonial architecture and a garden brimming with papayas, avocados and custard apples. What followed was a love affair with a country and its people that has endured.

One Year Off: Leaving It All Behind for a Round-the-World Journey with Our Children by David Elliot Cohen (910.4 COHEN)
When David Elliott Cohen turned 40, he freaked out, sold everything, swooped up his wife and three kids and took a year off to travel around the world – from Costa Rica and Burgundy to Zimbabwe, Laos and Sydney – with clan in tow. This gutsy dive into the non-antiseptic, non-Americanized world (a dream for some), offers an entertaining peek into family life on the road. Written in a personal, personable e-mail style, it's often hilarious.

The Lady in the Palazzo: At Home in Umbria by Marlena de Blasi (945 DEBLASI)
Following A Thousand Days in Venice and A Thousand Days in Tuscany, this book, set in Orvieto, is ostensibly about de Blasi’s effort, with her Italian husband, first to find, then to renovate, and at last to move into the ballroom of a splendid, dilapidated medieval palazzo. The renovation becomes an engrossing portrait of the town and some of its inhabitants. Nothing goes according to plan or schedule, but de Blasi uses the years (literally) of waiting to explore the life of the town, centering on the home-based caffé-kitchen of her friend Miranda and the caffé's patrons.

Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China by Rachel Dewoskin (951 DEWOS)
DeWoskin moved to Beijing in 1989, shortly after the military squashed the democracy
movement in Tiananmen Square, but just as China's younger population began embracing Western ideologies and commodities. This entertaining romp through her five-plus years in Beijing details her life as a PR consultant – and as the star of the wildly popular Chinese nighttime television drama Foreign Babes in Beijing.

Extra Virgin: A Young Woman Discovers the Italian Riviera, Where Every Month is Enchanted by Annie Hawes (945 HAW)
Fed up with cold, foggy London and the high cost of real estate, Annie Hawes is persuaded by her sister Lucy to travel to Italy and graft roses for the winter. The sisters arrive in rural Liguria with some formal Italian, no knowledge of rose grafting, and visions of Mediterranean men and sun. What they find is a town full of hard-working, wary olive growers smack in the middle of an olive oil depression who think these two young Englishwomen are nuts.

The Hills of Tuscany by Ferenc Máté (914.5 MATE)
After years of nomadic roaming from Central America to Canada, Máté (a writer) and his wife, Candace (a painter), visit Tuscany and impulsively decide that this is where they will settle down. A year later they return and begin the hunt for their dream house.

A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveler by Frances Mayes (914.04 MAYES)
Mayes, author of the bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun plus three more follow-up odes to her adopted home, lives a blessedly split life – going back and forth between northern California and Cortona, Italy, which provides her Tuscan sunshine. It is from these bases that she and her husband, Ed, venture forth to the places some will find familiar – Scotland, the Greek islands, Naples. Also by this author: A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun.

Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman by Alice Steinbach (818 STE)
In a travel-book-cum-memoir set against a glamorous background of European cities, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steinbach describes the months she spent traveling after she took a sabbatical from her job as columnist for the Baltimore Sun.

Driving Over Lemons: A Optimist in Spain by Chris Stewart (946 STE)
When English sheep shearer Chris Stewart (once a drummer for the band Genesis) bought an isolated farmhouse in the mountains outside of Granada, Spain, he was fully aware that it didn't have electricity, running water, or access to roads. But he had little idea of the headaches and hilarity that would follow (including scorpions, runaway sheep and the former owner who won't budge). He also had no idea that his memoir about southern Spain would set a standard for literary travel writing.

Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux (916 THE)
In Dark Star Safari the wittily observant and endearingly irascible Paul Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry and train. In the course of his epic and enlightening journey, he endures danger, delay and dismaying circumstances.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost (306 TROOST)
Although accustomed to globe trotting, Troost and his wife, Sylvia, were truly innocents abroad when they moved to the island of Tarawa in the South Pacific, where Sylvia had accepted a government position. Tarawa is the capital of Kiribati – a republic of tiny atolls located just above the equator. Culture shock ensued for Maarten and Sylvia, and he chronicles their two years on Tarawa in a hilarious, sardonic travelogue.

Honeymoon with My Brother: A Memoir by Franz Wisner (910.4 WISNE)
Until he was dumped at the altar, Franz Wisner had the world by the tail. He was engaged to the beautiful Annie and worked as a government-relations official for a California real-estate giant, rubbing elbows with bigwig politicians. But then his fiancée dumped him days before their wedding, and his boss demoted him. So he dragged his younger brother, Kurt, a Seattle realtor and divorcé, to Costa Rica for his already-scheduled honeymoon. Both inspired and desperate, the two quit their jobs, sold their houses, gave away their belongings and traveled the world for two years, romping through Europe in a newly purchased Saab, then hitting the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America and Africa.

List created Februrary 2008