Books like South from Granada by Gerald Brenan

George Orwell’s firsthand account of fighting with the POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War, detailing the conflict, its political betrayals, and the Republic’s struggle against Franco’s forces.

Journalist Helen Russell spends a year in rural Jutland uncovering the elements that make Denmark one of the world’s happiest countries, from childcare and education to interior design and tax policy.

Giles Tremlett traces the hidden scars of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, exploring how the nation’s long‑held "pact of forgetting" has finally been ruptured by the discovery of mass graves and the stories of ordinary Spaniards.

*The Face of Spain* is an account halfway between a scholarly travel book and a confessional diary, narrating the journey of Gerald Brenan and Gamel Woolsey through central and southern Spain in 1949.

Anna Leonowens, a British governess, travels to Siam to tutor the king’s children and encounters the king’s pride and the country’s unfamiliar customs.

A masterpiece of the historian's art, Hugh Thomas's *The Spanish Civil War* remains the best, most engrossing narrative of one of the most emblematic and misunderstood wars of the twentieth century. Revised and updated with significant new material, including new revelations about atrocities perpetrated against civilians by both sides in this epic conflict, this "definitive work on the subject" (Richard Bernstein, *The New York Times*) has been given a fresh face forty years after its initial publication in 1961. In brilliant, moving detail, Thomas analyzes a devastating conflict in which the hopes, dreams, and dogmas of a century exploded onto the battle field. Like no other account, *The Spanish Civil War* dramatically reassembles the events that led a European nation, in a continent on the brink of world war, to divide against itself, bringing into play the machinations of Franco and Hitler, the bloodshed of Guernica, and the deeply inspiring heroics of those who rallied to the side of democracy. Communists, anarchists, monarchists, fascists, socialists, democrats —the various forces of the Spanish Civil War composed a fabric of the twentieth century itself, and Thomas masterfully weaves the diffuse and fascinating threads of the war together in a manner that has established the book as a genuine classic of modern history.

Isabella L. Bird chronicles her Himalayan journey on horseback, living with Tibetans for four months and detailing their rituals, villages, monasteries, and culture.