Your Summer Reading List

Everyone knows summertime and travel go hand-in-hand. But that’s much easier said than done, considering any potential vacation comes with a bevy of questions and problems to solve. Do we have enough saved up to cover costs? Will we need to rent a car? Are our passports up-to-date? What will the kids eat?

Thankfully, you don’t need to board a plane to catch a glimpse into another culture — not when a good book can do it for you. Here are five novels that will take you around the world this summer, without leaving the comfort of your reading chair.

Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead)

Few meetings changed the course of Western history more than the one between Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés and Aztec emperor Moctezuma in 1519 in what is now Mexico City. In reality, Cortés and his small band of men killed Moctezuma and overthrew an entire empire. What You Dreamed of Empires wonders is: What if they didn’t? Enrigue’s novel (translated into English in 2024) is a dreamy, paranoid reimagining of the in-between period where the Spanish are unsure if they are guests of honour or lambs to the slaughter. Moctezuma, meanwhile, broods by himself while eating grasshopper tacos and tripping on cactus-based hallucinogens. It’s a culture clash unlike the one in your textbook.

Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation (New Directions)

Erpenbeck is one of Germany’s best-working novelists, and this slim volume, first published in 2008, captures nearly an entire century of her country’s history as seen through the various inhabitants of a single house on a lake outside of Berlin. Over the course of 150 pages, we meet a Jewish family fleeing the Third Reich, Russian soldiers needing a place to set up camp, an architect with an eye on renovations, refugees from Siberia and — who else? — real-estate agents. In Europe, occupants may come and go, but their homes can outlast them all.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Hanover Square)

Cozy Japanese fiction is having a moment right now, and there’s no better introduction to the genre (magical slice-of-life novels that often include books and cats) than Kawaguchi’s international bestseller. It’s set in a back-alley café in Tokyo that serves not just coffee but also time travel — provided that you return home before your drink gets too cool. Kawaguchi has published several sequels since the original appeared in 2015, so if you get hooked, there are plenty of refills to be had.

Jan Morris, Hav (NYRB)

The Mediterranean city-state of Hav just might be the most interesting place on Earth. It’s an isolated yet surprisingly cosmopolitan mixture of Russian, Italian and Arabic cultures that has hosted the likes of Marco Polo, Princess Diana and countless other historical figures in between. Never heard of Hav before? That’s understandable — since Morris made it all up. The prolific travel writer’s fictional account (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1985) is so vivid and detailed that you might feel like checking your atlas anyway, just to make sure.

Scholastique Mukasonga, Our Lady of the Nile (Archipelago)

This debut novel from the French-Rwandan author is a powerful commentary on the 1994 Rwandan genocide that’s all the more chilling by never addressing the events directly. Instead, Our Lady of the Nile takes place some 15 years earlier, at an elite Catholic boarding school for girls. What begins as a familiar-sounding coming-of-age story descends into something darker, as the country’s simmering ethnic and social conflicts start to re-manifest in the younger generation. It’s a captivating story about a horror that looms just over the horizon.

Michael Hingston is an author and the owner of Porch Light Books in Edmonton.