2023 Reading Challenge: Set somewhere you want to visit

Four mismatched women respond to an advert in The Times offering a beautiful medieval castle to rent on the Italian Riviera. Bashful Mrs Wilkins, cheerless Mrs Arbuthnot, widowed Mrs Fisher and socialite Lady Caroline Dester are each enchanted by the promise of 'wisteria and sunshine', and they arrive on the tranquil Mediterranean shores full of hope for a heavenly escape. Tensions mount between the group at first, but, as the idyllic spring days...

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears.

Clinically-depressed Darius Kellner, a high school sophomore, travels to Iran to meet his grandparents, but it is their next-door neighbor, Sohrab, who changes his life.

Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. This time in Australia.
His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest,...

"When she was suddenly given the opportunity of a new life in rural Jutland, journalist and archetypal Londoner Helen Russell discovered a startling statistic: the happiest place on earth isn't Disneyland, but Denmark, a land often thought of by foreigners as consisting entirely of long dark winters, cured herring, Lego, and pastries. What is the secret to their success? Are happy Danes born, or made? Helen decides there is only one way to find out:...

Offers an adaptation in graphic novel format of a modern classic about the globe-trotting spiritual journey of a humble shepherd boy.

The harrowing true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry -- with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter -- in the tradition of David Grann, Nathaniel Philbrick, and Hampton Sides. In August 1897, the young Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache set sail for a three year expedition aboard the good ship Belgica with dreams of glory. His destination was the uncharted end...

"Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her own youth. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amidst the rubble of war-torn...