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

Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski

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.

Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel

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.)

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.

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........

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