Books like Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett

After a May 1981 shooting in Savannah, John Berendt chronicles the city’s eccentric society, a murder trial, and the undercurrents of Southern culture in a nonfiction narrative that reads like a taut novel.

A series of tales about the Alhambra in Granada, once the residence of the last Muslim rulers of Spain.

Bill Bryson retraces a journey across Britain, from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, uncovering the country’s quirks, charms and changes with humor and keen observation.

John Berendt cross‑pads Venice after the 1996 Fenice fire, weaving history, culture, and quirky locals into a vivid portrait of a city on the brink.

"In this passionate, deeply personal book, Adam Nicolson explains why Homer matters--to him, to you, to the world--in a text full of twists, turns and surprises. In a spectacular journey through mythical and modern landscapes, Adam Nicholson explores the places forever haunted by their Homeric heroes. From Sicily, awash with wildflowers shadowed by Italy's largest oil refinery, to Ithaca, southern Spain, and the mountains on the edges of Andalusia and Extremadura, to the deserted, irradiated steppes of Chernobyl, where Homeric warriors still lie under the tumuli, unexcavated. This is a world of springs and drought, seas and cities, with not a tourist in sight. And all sewn together by the poems themselves and their great metaphors of life and suffering. Showing us the real roots of Homeric consciousness, the physical environment that fills the gaps between the words of the poems themselves, Nicholson's is itself a Homeric journey. A wandering meditation on lost worlds, our interconnectedness with our ancestors, and the surroundings we share. This is the original meeting of place and mind, our empathy with the past, our landscape as our drama. Following the acclaimed Gentry, which established him as one of the great landscape writers working today, Nicholson takes Homer's poems back to their source: beneath the distant, god-inhabited mountains, on the Trojan plains above the graves of the heroic dead, we find afresh the foundation level of human experience on Earth"--Publisher information.

For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa's photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil -- at reduced prices, and on credit. It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. For three crucial years in the 1930s the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Hochschild tells stories of ordinary people drawn into the conflict; provides a history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; and shows how the war was perceived in the United States through a pair of rival New York Times reporters, one sympathetic to Franco's Nationalist cause and the other to the Republican cause.

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

In "Putin Country" Anne Garrels follows ordinary Russians through Chelyabinsk, tracing their social and political aftershocks of the USSR’s collapse and exploring why Vladimir Putin enjoys such loyalty.