Notes: In Philadelphia in 1855, naturalist Erasmus Darwin Wells, 40, unmarried and gripped by a despondent realization that his life is a failure, sees a last chance to make his reputation as he prepares to accompany his future brother-in-law, Zechariah Voorhees, on a voyage to the arctic in search of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition.

Notes: Twenty-something Esme, a beautiful Italian-American woman, searches for a sense of place and a sense of self amidst the serene beauty and searing horrors of Africa. Looking for the Kenya of Karen Blixen, Esme can't escape the present.

Notes: China is Alice's spiritual home. She signs on as interpreter for archeologist Adam Spencer, who believes that the remains of Peking Man were hidden in the Mongolian desert during WWII by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Joined by two Chinese scientists, they venture into remote regions where the urgency of the search is paralleled by Alice's increasing attraction to Dr. Lin Shiyang, whose wife vanished from a labor camp in that region 20 years ago, and by the unfolding story of the relationship of Teilhard and an American woman who loved him.

Notes: When a group of American and English friends gather at a house in Tuscany for a two-week vacation, they find more than they bargained for. On Midsummer Night, mysterious forces conspire to draw everyone into the woods and keep them all there. Or did they just get lost? Was this really magic, or just the effervescence of discovering life's possibilities in a new setting?

Notes: Fleeing a life of civilized debauchery as well as romantic scandal and financial ruin, Prince Charles of Nassau-Siegen seeks fame and honor aboard the vessel Boudeuse. What he finds instead is a kind of earthly paradise. The Tahitians' native grace and spiritual ease calls into question all of Charles's assumptions about culture, even as he develops a rapport with a lovely island maiden named Ité.

Notes: After the narrative's quirky foursome meet during a turbulent flight from Dubai, their lives slowly intermingle as they seek happiness, companionship, and prosperity with one another.

Notes: Reclusive David Huntington writes rigorously meaningless poetry to great acclaim. But he lives fearfully, sleeping and working with earplugs, rarely going outside, drawing his life more closely around him every day. A wild parrot, a gift from his father, becomes the breach in the dike: it has a jungle shriek, fierce eyes, and a beak that wreaks havoc. David finally throws the bird out the window-and follows it into the world. A love story with an ornithological spin, this novel leads its two protagonists deep into the hinterlands of South America.

Notes: On an ill-fated art expedition into the southern Shan state of Burma, eleven Americans leave their Floating Island Resort for a Christmas morning tour and disappear. Through twists of fate, curses, and just plain human error, they find themselves deep in the jungle, where they encounter a tribe awaiting the return of the leader and the mythical book of wisdom that will protect them from the ravages and destruction of the Myanmar military regime.

Notes: Abel Paulus Crofton, the biracial son of an abusive, alcoholic saxophonist and a Dutch mother he never knew, confronts his past in a journey from Harlem, N.Y., to the neighborhood's titular Dutch namesake.

Notes: The fictional Jonathan Safran Foer, also a writer, travels to Eastern Europe after his junior year in college. His mission, as he ventures through the farmlands, is to find Augustine, who may have saved the grandfather he never knew from the Nazis.