Read as if You're on Vacation

Classics that take you far from home (and back into history).

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster

Hot-off-the-press titles that promise to transport and entertain.
Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey (Penguin, $26, www.amazon.com). This scathing but ultimately heart-wrenching memoir of growing up among San Francisco’s jaded glitterati jets from the City by the Bay to Moscow to New England prep schools to Tuscany and back again.

The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton, $24, www.amazon.com). This novel about a novel, and the people attached to and moved by it, shifts from World War II Europe to Chile to the New York City of today.

The Devil’s Teeth, by Susan Casey (Henry Holt, $25, www.amazon.com). The writer’s obsession with great white sharks takes her to their breeding ground off the coast of California’s Farallon Islands.

The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova (Little, Brown, $26, www.amazon.com). An Amsterdam teenager’s discovery in her home’s library results in a journey into deepest Transylvania (guess whom she’s looking for) in this new twist on an old-as-time theme.

A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby (Riverhead, $25, www.amazon.com). Four would-be suicides bond accidentally and hilariously on a rooftop in London on New Year’s Eve.