The Glass Kingdom by Lawrence Osborne

An air of menace always lurks through Osborne’s novels. It’s here in this absolutely stunning novel as well. Bangkok, with its tropical monsoons and accelerating civilian unrest threaten to envelop Sarah Mullins, a criminal farang on the loose from New York. The Kingdom, the high-rise where she lives, is its own brooding entity throwing the already uneasy Sarah off her game. As Sarah befriends two women in the building, she gets sucked into a whirlpool of missteps. Always suspenseful, never overwrought, this brilliant novel illuminates how survival of the fittest plays out on the bottom rungs of the food chain.

The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation

It might make sense today that Lady Liberty is holding aloft a bunch of arugula but remember when President Obama got flak for complaining about the rising cost of the greens? This rollicking book, published in 2006, chronicles how U.S. French dining made way for California and New American haute cuisine. It profiles a series of chefs along the way; Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters all get prime time. The book misses connecting the dots between these chefs and everyday people though: what changed in society that made people embrace microgreens and kombucha? An entertaining if incomplete history.

Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria by Kapka Kassabova

The restlessness that attends the immigrant experience is a familiar trope in writing. Sofia native Kapka Kassabova’s sharp and wistful memoir/travelogue is hands down the best I have read in the genre. For the longest time, Kassabova’s favorite outfit as a child was a pair of orange trousers her scientist parents brought back from Amsterdam. In describing even that one acquisition, Kassabova captures much of the simple joys of childhood. Decades after the family moves to New Zealand, Kassabova returns to a changed Bulgaria. The country, Kassabova finds, has moved on, but she hasn’t. Just brilliant. Read this book.

The Tummy Trilogy by Calvin Trillin

Get your silverware ready and tuck into these wry tales with one of America’s favorite food writers. I love Calvin Trillin’s work in the New Yorker and admire his passion for chasing after good eats. These volumes are peppered with an empathetic look at food and the people who love it, like Fats Goldberg, the pizza baron.After digging into this trilogy I realize though that his food commentary is best eaten like an amuse bouche, a little at a time to whet the appetite. Too much gluttony makes even the best food too rich and you tire of it. 

The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee by Stewart Lee Allen

The delightful premise of chasing down a cup of coffee around the world is not enough to rescue the tone of this food history and travelogue, which looks at its human subjects with detached amusement at best and outright harshness at its worst. The author labels India “dirty, undereducated, lazy, muddled, poor etc.” and mocks Islam as a religion that “insists half the species walk about with a bag over their head…” The writing is supposed to be “sardonic” — I can’t believe the empathetic Anthony Bourdain actually endorsed this book — but it’s just the white gaze cloaked as humor. Just like bad coffee, it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Villa Pacifica by Kapka Kassabova

The fevered dreams that travel writer Ute experiences in Villa Pacifica might be related to the wild animals or the tropical environs she and her husband Jerry are trapped in. Traveling to a South American country, the couple find themselves in a strange mansion run by a couple of firangs. A suffocating sense of doom weaves itself throughout the narrative until Ute finds herself slowly doubting the play of events. Is everything not as it seems or is she going mad? While built on an intriguing premise, Kassabova’s fiction packs less of a punch than her powerful nonfiction travelogues do. 

Migrations by Chalotte McConaghy

The Arctic tern’s migration is legendary: it travels all the way from the Arctic to the Antarctic Circle every year. Franny Lynch is determined to track these threatened birds as a way to redeem a past filled with her own flight from tragedy and the people she loves. As the story unfolds against the backdrop of accelerating climate change, we learn of the parallel reason for her ice-saturated voyage. Swashbuckling ride on rough seas notwithstanding, this is an extraordinary novel with plenty of room for quiet meditation, one that explores grief and familial bonds. Proof that still waters run deep.