A truism about stories (courtesy, more or less, of the novelist John Gardner) is that there are only two plots: a person goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. The joke is that they’re the same story, from two different perspectives. In the first half of 2025, I’ve found that my favorite books have lived up to the claim.

The best books I’ve read so far have all been preoccupied with the problem of travel, of leaving home, of being visited by strangers: how it broadens us and how it damages us, its attractions and its horrors. They are about how frightening it can be to enter a strange new place, and how frightening it can be when a stranger enters the familiar place we’ve known all our lives.

In the books I’m going to tell you about, a married couple is stranded on a life raft for four months. A spinsterish aunt leaves home to become a witch. And a woman sexually attracted to airplanes travels from one airport to the next, searching for the plane that will marry her.

For your convenience, I’ve further divided these books about our fair travelers into two categories: the whimsical and the arduous. (There’s overlap, of course, because how interesting can whimsy be if there isn’t a touch of work to make it worthwhile? And how can anyone make it through unrelenting toil without a dash of whimsy?) These should help guide you to the perfect book to accompany you on your summer travels. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Books in which homebodies go on whimsical journeys

In this deceptively warm comedy, a middle-aged Shakespearean actress who is a tad high and a lot anxious spends Thanksgiving Day roaming the streets of New York City, her little dog in tow. Profane, self-indulgent, and conflicted over the recent cancellation of her disgraced mentor, Mona Zahad is indeed acting out.

Although, speaking of self-indulgence, the mentor in question writes to Mona: “I am dying, Egypt, dying,” scrawled on a postcard that pictures Mona in character as Lady Macbeth, covered in blood. The missive, from the theatrical director Milton Katz, prompts Mona to begin her walkabout.

Milton discovered Mona, but he’s been fired for sexual harassment. Officially, Mona’s on Milton’s side: after all, he’d never hidden the fact that the price of working with him was to put up with a little unsolicited handsiness. Unofficially, Mona can’t help noticing that she’s become a more relaxed and dynamic actress since Milton was drummed out. She knows that Milton has re-invented himself as a martyr, and she can’t decide whether she wants to be a part of that martyrdom or not.

Reeling from pills and emotional foment, Mona stumbles her way down the length of Manhattan, quoting Shakespeare to herself as she goes. Mona Acts Out is the only Me Too novel I have yet to read that’s both sweet and sophisticated, an alchemical combination it must have borrowed from the Bard himself.

Read if you: have a favorite Kenneth Branagh-directed Shakespeare and are still a little bitter he never did cast Judi Dench in one of the plays.

Michael Lincoln, the hapless narrator of this metafictional romp, spends most of the events of Metallic Realms holed up in the Brooklyn apartment his parents pay for, eavesdropping on his roommate through a hidden microphone stashed in a house plant. But Mike is telling us his story from an undisclosed location somewhere in upstate New York. As we learn more about nerdy, awkward Mike — “deeply introverted, Sagittarius sun and Libra rising, Ravenclaw, Water Tribe citizen, lawful neutral, and an INTP” — it becomes clear that it would take a real tragedy to get him that far away from home.

Mike, Michel’s funhouse alter ego, is a classic geek fanboy, unable to mention the object of his obsessions without making bombastic claims about how it has “shat­tered the calcified worldbuilding paradigm that dominates science fiction.” In this case, however, Mike is hyperfixated on the deeply mediocre science fiction that his roommate’s writing collective, Orb 4, has been churning out for fun. They’ve denied Mike entry into the collective, so he’s appointed himself lore keeper instead. (The rest of the group doesn’t know that he believes his role requires complete records of their meetings; hence that hidden mic.)

Michel has described Metallic Realms as “Pale Fire meets Star Trek,” and the Nabokovian comparisons aren’t off-base. According to Mike, what we’re reading is the collective work of Orb 4, interspersed with annotations and historical context from Mike in his capacity as lore keeper. Mike’s commentary, however, lets us in on a bigger story behind his pompous bloviating and creepy stalking. It’s a tragedy, a story about the grinding miseries and disappointments of trying to build a life that leaves you room to be creative and make art. Even if the art you create is, to all but the most biased possible observer, never more than just okay.

Read alongside: Pale Fire for the structure, Vladimir for the Nabokov pastiche, and Among Others for the heart.

In Woodworking, the debut novel by former Vox critic Emily St. James, leaving home is the dream, the impossible ideal. To leave one’s old life and parents behind, reinvent oneself, and move to a new city where no one can ever say you were anyone different, like moving out for college but with no Thanksgiving homecoming.

In the case of Woodworking’s two narrators, Erica and Abigail, the dream specifically is to move to a new city where no one will ever know that they’re trans. For Erica, a high school English teacher, the dream feels impossible: she’s already built a whole life as a man in small-town South Dakota, complete with an ex-wife she’s still in love with. For 17-year-old Abigail, Erica’s student and the only out trans person she knows, the dream feels tantalizingly close. Abigail already hates her parents anyway, so what’s one more level of estrangement?

Woodworking is a charming, sparkling, and very human novel that packs a heavy punch. Its heart and soul lies with the vexed relationship between Erica and Abigail, forced into alliance after Erica comes out to Abigail and Abigail, horrified, realizes she’s going to have to be her dorky English teacher’s trans mentor and teach her how to paint her fingernails. This book is a hoot and a ride.

Read accompanied by: Something fizzy and sweet with a little bitter kick in the background. Blood orange San Pellegrino, maybe?

The memoirist and novelist Nina Stibbe first arrived in London in the 1980s as a bright-eyed 20-year-old nanny. Her time caring for the children of a London Review of Books editor left her enmeshed in the literary scene of the moment, and the letters she wrote her sister about brushing shoulders with the bookish who’s who became the basis of her 2013 bestseller, Love, Nina.

In her new memoir Went to London, Took the Dog, Stibbe returns to London as a 60-year-old for a year-long sabbatical from her regular life in Cornwall. She plans to write her diary, she announces, in the style of celebrity playwright Alan Bennett: “He just writes what he’s been up to. Say he’s had Ian McEwan over for tea …”

Accordingly, Stibbe takes us to pub trivia with Nicholas Hornby and discusses the dishwashing abilities of her landlady, the novelist Deborah Moggach. Hilariously, she goes out of her way to sideswipe the notorious contrarian novelist Lionel Shriver. (Stibbe speaks at the same literary festival as Shriver and takes great care not to be caught alone at breakfast with her.) And all the perimenopause discourse around All Fours last summer should meet Stibbe’s accounts of prolapsed uteri and menopause-induced incontinence. Snoops rejoice: she does name names.

Every so often, however, Stibbe allows us a peek at what drove her back to London. It’s a trial separation from her husband, whom she never mentions by name. Likewise, she never tells us what, exactly, the problem is with her marriage, only that her coupled-up friends act “as if I’m going to infect their marriage,” and that “sometimes I must forget to breathe or something and have a terrible headache afterward.” Then the diary entry ends, and she moves on, as breezy as though she had never made such a deeply sad revelation, to the next day’s lunch meeting with Hornby and plumbing travails with Moggach.

Read accompanied by: good crunchy salt-and-vinegar potato chips, for an easy, addictive pleasure.

For a certain type of reader, among whom I count myself, Lolly Willowes will be a nearly perfect novel. First published in 1926 amid an England unsure of what to do with its newly-liberated women, and reissued this year by Modern Library, it tells the story of Laura “Aunt Lolly” Willowes and her decision to become a witch.

Laura is a decorous spinster who, in middle age, decides she is fed up with taking care of her family and moves away to a village by the woods. There, Laura makes the acquaintance of a supernatural cat and witnesses a macabre black Sabbath with a coven of witches. Selling her soul to Satan, Laura concludes, feels like a much better move than spending her whole life making herself useful to an unending stream of children.

Lolly Willowes presents itself to the reader with all the placid charm of a comic English country novel, a Cold Comfort Farm or a Love In a Cold Climate. Yet its pleasantly arch, witty voice is hiding a deep well of fury. “The one thing all women hate,” Laura tells Satan, “is to be thought dull” — yet Laura’s whole life is a series of dull, mean contrivances, built for her by other people. A little bit of witchcraft of her own volition does her good.

Read if you: wish the Mitford sisters had written something a little more queer; have been known to mess with Tarot cards; go wild for a walk in an autumnal forest.

Books in which the journey is harrowing

To say that Dream Count is probably the weakest of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels is less an indictment of Dream Count than it is a recognition of how high she’s set the bar. From Adichie, even a minor effort is worth a read.

Dream Count tells the story of four women, all from Nigeria, all either currently living in the US or having recently returned to Nigeria from the US. Stranded in the early desultory days of the pandemic, they begin going back over their relationships with the (mostly terrible) men they have known — their “dream count,” says one.

Much of Dream Count is satirical, and Adichie is at her sharpest and most biting when dealing with the flummoxed reactions of white liberal Americans to wealthy, cosmopolitan Africans. “They can’t stand rich people from poor countries because it means they can’t feel sorry for you,” remarks Omelogor, who hates America and moves straight back to Lagos.

There’s a jarring tonal shift, however, when Adichie delves into the mind of Kadiatou, the only poor woman among her four protagonists. Kadiatou’s story is based on the account of Nafissatou Diallo, a hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted assault in 2011. Adichie writes Kadiatou with a touching, at times reductive naivete — but what becomes deeply moving is the relationship Kadiatou develops with the other three women of this novel. America may not know what to do with African women of such disparate yet overlapping backgrounds, but they understand one another.

Read if you: want to remind yourself that before that viral TED Talk and Beyoncé sample, Adichie was also a very good novelist.

In 1972, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a real-life British couple, set sail in the little yacht into which they had sunk all their life savings. Obsessed with the idea of escaping the suburbs and exploring the wilderness, they planned to make their way from England to New Zealand. Instead, nearly a year into their voyage, their boat sank.

The Baileys found themselves stranded on their tiny inflatable rubber raft, along with the few supplies they’d managed to salvage: fresh water, canned food, a biography of Richard III. There they would remain, surviving against all odds, for the next four months.

The story of the Baileys became a media sensation after they were eventually recovered, but it has long since faded from the collective memory. In this elegant and electric account, journalist Sophie Elmhirst reconstructs every day of their four-month ordeal, and the blistering aftermath of their eventual rescue.

Surrounded by far more wilderness than they ever counted on, the Baileys caught fish and sea turtles, tried and failed to signal to passing ships, and read every line of that damn biography over and over again. The book, optimistic Maralyn tells fatalist Maurice, will form the basis of their library once they get home.

In Elmhurst’s hands, the story of the Baileys’ ordeal becomes a portrait of a marriage: how two people can drive each other to the edges of despair, and how they can keep each other alive in a time of almost unimaginable horror.

I galloped through it in a single night. You will too.

Read accompanied by: plentiful supplies to gloat over as the Baileys’ condition gets worse and worse. Imagine you’re a kid reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s worst winter again, and go from there.

Susan Choi’s last book, 2019’s Trust Exercise, was a structural triumph, so fine and precise it cut like a knife. Flashlight, her new novel, is a looser, less showy affair. It creeps up on you, so you don’t quite register how deeply it’s gotten its hooks in you until days later, when you’re still thinking about it.

Flashlight begins with a girl and her father on the Japanese beach at twilight, heading out to look at the stars. The girl, American-born Louisa, is a precocious 10-year-old. Her father, Serk, is a Japanese-born Korean man who is almost always angry. A day after they go star-watching, Louisa is found unconscious on the shore. Serk is lost and presumed dead, his body never recovered.

Part of the deep pleasure of Flashlight is how finely Choi renders the mind of Louisa, who soon finds herself to be, like her father before her, always angry. Louisa is filled with rage at the adults around her: her teachers, who she considers stupid and incompetent; the school psychiatrist, who isn’t smart enough to understand her; most of all her disabled mother, whom Louisa believes to be a liar and a malingerer. Louisa is angry in the way of a child: betrayed by the adults who have failed to live up to the expectations she set for them. And as Louisa grows into a fraught, uneasy adulthood, we see how her child’s rage continues to shape her psyche in ways that she herself observes with surprise and confusion.

Read alongside: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910–1945

The narrator of Kate Folk’s sly, clever Sky Daddy presents her problem to readers on the first page. “This was my destiny,” candid Linda says, with characteristic transparency: “for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate midflight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.”

Linda is sexually attracted to planes. She believes the only way to marry one is to die in a plane crash. With that simple equation in mind, she devotes her paltry salary to taking as many plane trips as she can; mostly regional ones, to nearby midsize cities. Nevertheless, none of the “fine gentlemen” who woo her on each flight has yet taken her to be his bride. Desperate, Linda starts exploring the world of vision boarding to see if it can bring her closer to her destiny.

There is a version of Sky Daddy that treats Linda as an object of malicious fun, but Folk never stoops so low. She takes Linda completely seriously: Linda, after all, has devoted her life to the pursuit of love, accepting the prospect of her own self-destruction with steely equanimity. Linda is part Ahab, part Ishmael, and her white whale is the first plane she ever fell in love with. This is a strange and tender novel, and it has lingered in my mind for months.

Read if you: feel Elinor Oliphant Is Completely Fine would have benefited from being weirder, or Moby-Dick would have benefited from more sex.

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

My husband and I have a good relationship. We’re both committed to personal growth and continual learning and have developed very strong communication skills. A couple of years ago we were exposed to some friends with an open marriage and had our own conversations about ethical non-monogamy. At first, neither of us were interested.

Now, my husband is interested and currently is attracted to a colleague who is also into him. She’s married and has no idea that he and I talk about all of their interactions. He doesn’t know what her relationship agreements are with her husband.

I’m not currently interested in ethical non-monogamy. I see things in our relationship that I’d like to work on together with my husband. I want more of his attention and energy, to be frank. I don’t want his attention and energy being funneled into another relationship. I don’t have moral issues with ethical non-monogamy, I just don’t actually see any value-add for me right now. The cost-benefit analysis leaves me saying “not now.”

My husband admitted that he’s hoping I will have a change of mind. I don’t want to force his hand, although I am continuing to say very clearly what I want in my relationship. How do we reach a compromise? If he cuts ties with this woman, he has resentment towards me. If he continues to pursue something with her, I feel disrespected, and while I don’t want to leave him I would feel the need to do something.

Dear Monogamously Married,

I want to start by commending you for two things. First, for your openness to discussing and exploring all this with your husband. Second, for your insistence on clearly stating what you actually want — and don’t want.

I think Erich Fromm, the 20th-century German philosopher and psychologist, would back me up in saying that you’d do well to hold tight to both those qualities. For starters, radical openness is important because, according to Fromm, the basic premise of love is freedom. He writes:

Love is a passionate affirmation of its “object.” That means that love is not an “affect” but an active striving, the aim of which is the happiness, development, and freedom of its “object.”

In other words, love is not a feeling. It’s work, and the work of love is to fully support the flourishing of the person you love. That can be scary — what if the person discovers that they’re actually happier with somebody else? — which is why Fromm specifies that only someone with a strong self “which can stand alone and bear solitude” will be up for the job. He continues:

This passionate affirmation is not possible if one’s own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate.

So far, it might sound like Fromm is saying that to be a good lover is to be a doormat: you just have to do whatever’s best for the other person, even if it screws you over. But his view is very much the opposite.

In fact, Fromm cautions us against both “masochistic love” and “sadistic love.” In the first, you give up your self and sacrifice your needs in order to become submerged in another person. In the second, you try to exert power over the other person. Both of these are rooted in “a deep anxiety and an inability to stand alone,” writes Fromm; whether by dissolving yourself into them or by controlling them, you’re trying to make it impossible for the other person to abandon you. Both approaches are “pseudo-love.”

So although Fromm doesn’t want you to try to control your partner, and although he suggests that the philosophical ideal is for you to passionately affirm your partner’s freedom, he’s not advising you to do that if, for you, that will mean masochism.

If you’re not up for ethical non-monogamy — if you feel, like many people, that the idea of giving your partner free rein is too big a threat to your relationship or your own well-being — then pretending otherwise is not real love. It’s just masochistic self-annihilation.

I’m personally partial to Fromm’s non-possessive approach to love. But I equally appreciate his point that the philosophical ideal could become a practical bloodbath if it doesn’t work for the actual humans involved. I think the question, then, is this: Do you think it’s possible for you to get to a place where you genuinely feel ready for and interested in ethical non-monogamy?

It sounds like you’re intellectually open to the idea, and given that you said you’re committed to personal growth and continual learning, non-monogamy could offer you some benefits; lots of people who practice it say that part of its appeal lies in the growth it catalyzes. And if practicing non-monogamy makes you and/or your husband more fulfilled, it could enrich your relationship and deepen your appreciation for each other.

But right now, you’ve got a problem: Your husband is pushing on your boundaries by flirting with a woman even after you’ve expressed that you don’t want him pursuing something with her. And you already feel like he isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, so the prospect of having to divvy up those resources with another woman feels threatening. Fair!

Notice, though, that that isn’t a worry about non-monogamy per se — it’s a worry about the state of your current monogamous relationship.

In a marriage, what partners typically want is to feel emotionally secure. But that comes from how consistently and lovingly we show up for and attune to one another, not from the relationship structure. A monogamous marriage may give us some feeling of security, but it’s obviously no guarantee; some people cheat, some get divorced, and some stay loyally married while neglecting their partner emotionally.

“Monogamy can serve as a stand-in for actual secure attachment,” writes therapist Jessica Fern in Polysecure, a book on how to build healthy non-monogamous relationships. She urges readers to take an honest look at any relationship insecurities or dissatisfactions that are being disguised by monogamy, and work with partners to strengthen the emotional experience of the relationship.

Since you feel that your husband isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, be sure to talk to him about it. Explain that it doesn’t feel safe for you to open up the relationship without him doing more to be fully present with you and to make you feel understood and precious. See if he starts implementing these skills more reliably.

In the meantime, while you two are trying to reset your relationship, it’s absolutely reasonable to ask him to cool it with the colleague he’s attracted to; he doesn’t have to cut ties with her entirely (and may not be able to if they work together), but he can certainly avoid feeding the flames with flirtation. Right now, the fantasy of her is a distraction from the work he needs to be doing to improve the reality of your marriage. He should understand why a healthy practice of ethical non-monogamy can’t emerge from a situation where he’s pushing things too far with someone else before you’ve agreed to change the terms of your relationship (and if he doesn’t, have him read Polysecure!).

It’s probably a good idea for you to each do your own inner work, too. Fern, like Fromm, insists that if we want to be capable of a secure attachment with someone else, we need to cultivate that within ourselves. That means being aware of our feelings, desires, and needs, and knowing how to tend to them. Understanding your attachment style can help with this; for example, if you’re anxiously attached and you very often reach out to your partner for reassurance, you can practice spending time alone.

After taking some time to work on these interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, come back together to discuss how you’re feeling. Do you feel more receptive to opening up the relationship? Do you think it would add more than it would subtract?

If the answer is “yes” or “maybe,” you can create a temporary relationship structure — or “vessel,” as Fern calls it — to help you ease into non-monogamy. One option is to adopt a staggered approach to dating, where one partner (typically the more hesitant one) starts dating new people first, and the other partner starts after a predetermined amount of time. Another option is to try a months-long experiment where both partners initially engage in certain romantic or sexual experiences that are less triggering to each other, then assess what worked and what didn’t, and go from there.

If the answer is “no” — if you’re not receptive to opening up your relationship — then by all means say that! Given you’ll have sincerely done the work to explore whether non-monogamy works for you, your husband doesn’t get to resent you. He can be sad, he can be disappointed, and he can choose to leave if the outcome is intolerable to him. But he’ll have to respect you, and what’s more important, you’ll have to respect yourself.

Bonus: What I’m reading