DonateAre you participating in the 2024 Adult Summer Reading Challenge but need help with this specific bingo square? We’ve got some suggestions for you! Browse through the titles and click to access the catalog record. Happy reading!
The following titles are all fictions books where the characters go on a road trip.
Looking for more summer reading suggestions? Check our blog archive for more!
All My Mother’s Lovers / Ilana Masad After her mom, Iris, dies suddenly, Maggie Krause fulfills a request from Iris’ will to send five sealed letters, all addressed to men Maggie’s never heard of. Exhausted after the funeral, she makes the snap decision to deliver the letters in person. Unfolding in California and Las Vegas over the week of Iris’ shiva, Maggie journeys to meet these men, each one more surprising than the last and each telling her so much she never knew about her mom.
America for Beginners / Leah Franqui The recently widowed Pival Sengupta is traveling thousands of miles from Kolkata to New York, then on a cross-country journey to California, to find her beloved son, Rahi. A year ago, Rahi devastated his very traditional parents when he told them he was gay. Then, Pival’s husband, Ram, told her that Rahi had died suddenly–heartbreaking news she still refuses to accept. Now, with Ram gone, she is going to America to find Rahi, alive and whole or dead and gone, and come to terms with her own life.
Bird Summons / Leila Aboulela When Salma, Moni, and Iman — friends and active members of their local Muslim Women’s group — take a road trip to the Scottish Highlands, they leave behind lives often dominated by obligation, frustrated desire, and dull predictability. Salma is successful and happily married, but tempted to risk it all when she’s contacted by her first love back in Egypt; Moni gave up a career in banking to care for her disabled son without her indifferent husband’s help; and Iman, in her twenties and on her third marriage, longs for freedom and autonomy. When the women are visited by the Hoopoe, a sacred bird from Muslim and Celtic literature, they are compelled to question their relationships to faith and femininity, love, loyalty, and sacrifice.
Getting Mother’s Body / Suzan-Lori Parks Billy Beede, the teenage daughter of the fast-running, no-account, and six-years-dead Willa Mae, learns one day that Willa Mae’s burial spot in LaJunta, Arizona, is about to be plowed up to make way for a supermarket. Billy is heiress to her mother’s substantial but unconfirmed fortune–a cache of jewels that Willa Mae’s lover, Dill Smiles, is said to have buried with her. Billy knows that treasure could mean salvation. So she heads for Arizona with Dill in hot pursuit.
Girls on the Verge / Sharon Biggs Waller On the very night Camille learns she got into a prestigious theater program, she also finds out she’s pregnant. At her most vulnerable, Camille reaches out to Annabelle, a girl she only barely knows from the theater. Annabelle agrees to drive her wherever she needs to go; best friend Bea doesn’t agree with Camille’s decision, but decides to come with. Over the course of a thousand miles, friendships will be tested and dreams will be challenged.
In the Face of the Sun / Denny S. Bryce To escape an abusive marriage, Frankie Saunders flees across the country to Los Angeles with her reckless, profane Aunt Daisy, who will do whatever it takes to settle old scores and resolve the past–no matter what the damage, forcing Frankie to make some hard choices.
The Last Great Road Bum / Héctor Tobar When Joe Sanderson of Urbana, Illinois, was a middle-class teenager, he met a British adventurer who had circumnavigated the globe solo. What a great thing it would be, Joe thought, if he could do the same. Several years later, he became the quintessential road bum and hitchhiker, following his thumb through 70 countries around the world. The vividly realized particulars of his restless journeys are offered in Tobar’s remarkable novelization of Sanderson’s real life.
The Leisure Seeker / Michael Zadoorian John and Ella Robina, a couple married 50+ years–she has stopped her cancer treatments, he has Alzheimer’s–kidnap themselves from the adult children and the doctors who seem to run their lives, and steal off on a forbidden vacation determined to prove that, when it comes to life, you can go back for seconds and sneak a little extra time.
Life & Times of Michael K / J.M. Coetzee In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity.
Lost Children Archive / Valeria Luiselli An unnamed couple and their children embark on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Arizona. Husband and wife both work as audio recording artists, dedicated to capturing the soundscapes of everyday life. Upon their arrival, he plans to investigate the native Apache people who used to populate the Southwest, and she has promised to find a friend’s daughters who have been arrested at the border. When the family arrives however, the overwhelming scale of the migrant crisis redirects their efforts, and the children eventually lose themselves in the strange, uncertain terrain.
Mrs. Nash’s Ashes / Sarah Adler Former child star Millicent Watts-Cohen is determined to fulfill the dying wish of Rose Nash, her elderly landlady and dear friend. She sets out for Key West, Fla., to reunite Rose–or rather, some of her cremains–with Rose’s long-lost love, Elsie Brown, who is in hospice. She hopes to deliver the ashes before Elsie dies, but a major airport computer meltdown may foil those plans. Enter an acquaintance of her jerk ex-boyfriend, writer Hollis Hollenbeck, who is also stranded at the airport en route to Florida. The pair decide to drive together, and though perpetually sunny Millicent and curmudgeon Hollis make an odd couple, they bond quickly as the trip progresses. The story toggles between the present day and WWII, when Rose and Elsie’s forbidden queer romance first blossomed.
Nevada / Imogen Binnie The darkly comedic story of Maria Griffiths, a young trans woman living in New York City and trying to stay true to her punk values while working retail. When she finds out her girlfriend has lied to her, her world begins to unravel, and Maria sets out on a road trip to Star City, Nevada. Here, she meets James, who’s probably trans. What happens next is either their salvation or downfall.
The New Life / Orhan Pamuk Osman is an ordinary engineering student in Istanbul until he comes across a book that changes his life. A sort of quasimystical tract, it provides a guide to a new life that is so irresistible Osman becomes obsessed by it. Soon he meets up with two more devotees of the book, the beautiful Janan and Mahmet, her boyfriend. When Mahmet suddenly disappears, Janan and Osman, who is now totally in love with Janan, set out to find him.
The Savage Detectives / Roberto Bolaño New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: To track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesarea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
She’s Up to No Good / Sara Goodman Confino Four years into her marriage, Jenna is blindsided when her husband asks for a divorce. With her life in flux, she agrees to accompany her eccentric grandmother Evelyn on a road trip to the seaside Massachusetts town where their family history was shaped. When they hit the road, Evelyn spins the tale of her star-crossed teenage romance more than seventy years ago that changed the course of her life. As the secrets and truths of Evelyn’s past unfold, Jenna discovers a new side of her grandmother, and of herself, that she never knew existed.
Sing, Unburied, Sing /Jesmyn Ward Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
Tilly and the Crazy Eights / Monique Gray Smith When Tilly receives an invitation to help drive eight elders on their ultimate bucket-list road trip, she impulsively says yes. Before she knows it, Tilly is on an adventure with the elders who soon dub themselves “the Crazy Eights.” The Crazy Eights each choose a stop–somewhere or something they’ve always wanted to experience–on the way to their ultimate goal, the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow in Albuquerque. Their plan is to travel to Las Vegas, Sedona, and the Redwood Forests, with each destination the inspiration for secrets and stories to be revealed. The trip proves to be powerful medicine as they laugh, heal, argue, and dream along the way.
The Travelling Cat Chronicles / Hiro Arikawa Outside his window, Satoru hears the piercing cries of an animal in pain. It’s the stray cat he has been feeding for the last several months, who now has a broken leg. Eventually, Satoru adopts the cat and names him Nana, and the two live happily together for many years. Reality hits hard, however, when, for reasons unclear to Nana, Satoru must find the cat a new home. And so begins a journey across Japan in a silver van as the two visit Satoru’s old friends.
The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters / Balli Kaur Jaswal The British-born Punjabi Shergill sisters–Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina– barely got along growing up, and now as adults, have grown even further apart. Rajni, a school principal, is a stickler for order. Jezmeen, a thirty-year-old struggling actress, fears her big break may never come. Shirina, the peacemaking “good” sister married into wealth and enjoys a picture-perfect life. On her deathbed, their mother voices one last wish: that her daughters will make a pilgrimage together to the Golden Temple in Amritsar to carry out her final rites.
The Wangs vs. The World / Jade Chang Charles Wang built a successful cosmetics company after coming to Los Angeles from China. But after the 2008 financial crisis, he’s bankrupt. The only thing to do? Round up his family and return to China to claim his ancestral lands. The first stop is his oldest daughter’s house in rural New York, prompting a cross-country road trip involving Charles, second-wife Barbra, college-age Andrew (a would-be stand-up comic) and teenager Grace, who thinks this all might be a joke. It turns out that the Wangs can’t function without the trappings of their now-lost lavish lifestyle, giving their road trip a decidedly wacky bent.