Great Escapes

For this holiday issue, we asked fourteen writers what book they would recommend to a friend craving a little escape from the world's cares.

JANE SMILEY

(Author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel )

My favorite escape is in three linked novels by Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and Don't Tell Alfred . The first two take place before World War II, the third during the Cold War. All are worldly, humane and just a tad scandalous. Wit sometimes doesn't last, but Mitford's does. The reader gets to laugh at and revel in the contrasts between the English and the French; Mitford was fond and skeptical of both. These books are a lesson in how to be truly funny and irreverent, no matter how dark geopolitical events may look.

COLM TÓIBÍN

(Author of The Master )

Francisco Goldman's The Divine Husband is a novel you can lose yourself in. This intricate, fluent and engaging story, set in 19th-century Central America and New York, tells the story of Mara de las Nieves, who, in an astonishing opening section, is portrayed as a young novice in a convent. Goldman writes well about the strangeness of convent life, the rules, the rituals. And then, once Mara is freed, he opens the story out into political and sexual intrigue, with many minor characters drawn with the same skill as the subplots and accounts of trade and domestic life. In the later sections of the book, he takes his characters to New York, by which time we have come to love them and care deeply about their fates.

PENELOPE LIVELY

(Author of Making It Up )

Barry Lopez has been called "America's foremost poet-naturalist," and, for me, his Arctic Dreams is the ultimate vicarious travel experience. I shall never get to the Arctic, but, thanks to Lopez's emotive prose, I can imagine the icebergs the size of cathedrals, the campsites of Eskimos who died 15,000 years ago, the endless plains where snow geese rise like twists of smoke, a polar bear's ivory-white head gliding in glassy black water, herds of beluga whales under sheets of young ice. Lopez is erudite, brimming with enthusiasm, occasionally anthropomorphic. He is given to bowing in respect to birds and seals, as he carries the reader with him into this strange and wonderful environment. Arctic Dreams won the National Book Award in 1986 and has had many readers, but for those who have missed it, get hold of it at once.

TOM WOLFE

(Author of I Am Charlotte Simmons )

Almost anything by Carl Hiaasen, but if I had to pick one: Strip Tease . Come to think of it, in terms of a recent major care of the world, Stormy Weather is right up there, too. It offers the best picture in our literature of what a Category 4 hurricane is like to those who have, in the current phrase, "refused to evacuate." Hiaasen's genius -- and he is a genius -- is not to avoid the cares of the world but to reduce them to their truly ridiculous inner cores. His work is always current and topical. Our escapee will be so thoroughly dissolved in laughter that he will think of the real world as a pool in which he can float on his back drinking sidecars and Tom Collinses and peering at an ever-blue sky through Oliver Peoples sunglasses and layers of 30-level sun block.