Books like Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz

A chilling memoir detailing Solomon Northup's harrowing experience as a captive on a Louisiana plantation for twelve years, from 1841 to 1853.

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.

Frances Mayes recounts her transformation in Tuscany, restoring a villa and discovering its art, architecture, and cuisine, inviting readers to taste Italian life through her poetic, travel‑literary lens.

A memoir of Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer's escape from a WWII British internment camp in India and his 21‑month trek across the Himalayas to Lhasa, Tibet.

A thrilling historical spy novel set during the American Revolution, inspired by accusations of venality and featuring a common man wrongly suspected as a spy for the British, who refuses to accept payment for information vital to the Patriot's cause.

Fourteen‑year‑old Nick Diamond teams up with his bumbling detective brother Tim to unravel a thrilling mystery that follows international spies and assassins through London.

"Olmsted came to Texas in the 1850s. He had a trained eye for land and its use. He visited Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Eagle Pass, the German settlements (his favorite settlers) and the coastal towns and plantations. It is perceptive and intelligent reporting and reaming good reading." --A.C. Green THE 50 BEST BOOKS ABOUT TEXAS

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is best known for designing New York City's Central Park, and parks in Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, and Washington. But before he embarked upon his career as the nation's foremost landscape architect, he was a correspondent for The New York Times, and it was under its auspices that he journeyed through the slave states in the 1850s. His day-by-day observations - including intimate accounts of the daily lives of masters and slaves, the operation of the plantation system, and the pernicious effects of slaves on all classes of society, black and white - were largely collected in the Cotton Kingdom. Published in 1861, just as the Southern states were storming out of the Union, it has been hailed ever since as singularly fair and authentic, an unparalleled account of America's "peculiar institution."

Kate Betts chronicles her 1980s Parisian debut as a fashion journalist, blending memoir, travel, and insider fashion lore amid the era’s shifting creative landscape.