Last updated on December 3rd, 2024
Featured image: Our 2025 Book Club selections will get those travel plans going!| Photo by insidecreativehouse on Envato
Travel by book to Australia, Bordeaux, Canada, the Caribbean, England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and South Africa
by JourneyWoman
As our travel book club goes into its fifth year, we’re returning to more frequent book club meetings to foster dialogue and build more connections around the world. Selected with our book club partner TripFiction, these six books have a strong sense of place and cover a range of genres, including mystery, memoir, suspense and historical fiction.
For this book club, we choose books that we have read and recommend. We review mainstream book lists but want books with a strong sense of place that gives us more insight into a culture or community. Ideally, these books have a woman at the heart, and are written by a woman, but we do make exceptions. We seek diversity in the genre, author and location but also want stories and ideas that provoke discussion and shift perspectives. We check availability to ensure it’s readily available in libraries, and other formats including audible and printed books. While we always invite the authors, some are not available due to time zones.
Join a book club meeting to meet other women who love travel! Our book club is run by two passionate volunteer co-hosts Wendy Brooke and Sally Jane Smith, with input from JourneyWoman Editor Carolyn Ray and TripFiction’s Tina Hartas. Discussion questions are provided in advance but it’s not necessary that you’ve read the book as the questions allow for everyone to participate. This year, you can register for all book club meetings through the links provided, however, please check your email for a confirmation from Zoom after you register. If you sign up for the meetings, we ask that you please join as these take a lot of work to organize and host. Learn more on our Book Club page here and sign up for our emails here.
2025 JourneyWoman Book Club Selections
Please note: When you purchase books using the links below, JourneyWoman receives a small commission at no cost to you. This helps us maintain our book club and produce editorial content. Thank you!
February Book of the Month
1. “After Story” by Larissa Behrendt, set in England and Australia
When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine decides to take her mother, Della, on a tour of England’s most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will bring them closer together and help them reconcile the past. Twenty-five years earlier the disappearance of Jasmine’s older sister devastated their tight-knit community. This tragedy returns to haunt Jasmine and Della when another child mysteriously goes missing on Hampstead Heath. As Jasmine immerses herself in the world of her literary idols – including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf – Della is inspired to rediscover the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling. But sometimes the stories that are not told can become too great to bear. Ambitious and engrossing, After Story celebrates the extraordinary power of words and the quiet spaces between. We can be ready to listen, but are we ready to hear?
April Book of the Month
2. The Spoon Stealer by Lesley Crewe, set in Nova Scotia, Canada
Born into a basket of clean sheets—ruining a perfectly good load of laundry—Emmeline never quite fit in on her family’s rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist. Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to talk to more humans. When she joins a memoir-writing course at the library, her classmates don’t know what to make of her. Funny, loud, and with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot. As her past unfolds for her audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even shares with them her third-biggest secret: she has liberated hundreds of spoons over her lifetime—from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill. She is a compulsive spoon stealer. Emmeline, in her final years, believes that a spoonful—perhaps several spoonfuls—of kindness can set to rights the family so broken by loss and secrecy. The Spoon Stealer is a classic Crewe book: full of humour, family secrets, women’s friendship, lovable animals, and immense heart
June Book of the Month:
3. Recipies for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew, set in South Africa
Meet Tannie Maria: A woman who likes to cook a lot and write a little. Tannie Maria writes recipes for a column in her local paper, the Klein Karoo Gazette. One Sunday morning, as Maria savours the breeze through the kitchen window whilst making apricot jam, she hears the screech and bump that announces the arrival of her good friend and editor Harriet. What Maria doesn’t realise is that Harriet is about to deliver the first ingredient in two new recipes (recipes for love and murder) and a whole basketful of challenges. A delicious blend of intrigue, milk tart and friendship, join Tannie Maria in her first investigation. Consider your appetite whetted for a whole new series of mysteries.
August Book of the Month
4. The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier, set in Venice
From the bestselling historical novelist, a rich, transporting story that follows a family of glassmakers from the height of Renaissance-era Italy to the present day. It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.
Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice where time moves as slowly as molten glass, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure. Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is as inventive as it is spellbinding: a mesmerizing portrait of a woman, a family, and a city as everlasting as their glass.
October Book of the Month
5. The Bordeaux Book Club by Gillian Harvey, set in France
When Leah and her husband moved to France, it was with the dream of becoming self-sufficient. But in truth, it’s not the ‘good life’ she’d imagined, as three hours of digging barely yield a single straggly carrot. Worse, her teenage daughter is acting up, and her husband seems to find every strange excuse under the hot French sun to disappear. So when her friend entreats her to join the new bookclub she’s forming, Leah decides it’s something she will do for herself. The chance to make new friends, to drink a few glasses of wine, and to escape into stories that take her miles away from the life she’d thought would be her own happy-ever-after. But the book club is a strange group of misfits. There’s prickly Grace, who lives alone and seems to know everybody and like no-one. Buttoned-up Monica, who says her husband is away and appears to be parenting her baby all alone. Handsome builder George, who has barely read a book before. And Alfie – who is a full two decades younger than everyone else, and is hiding a devastating secret… As the stories they read begin to bring the new friends closer together, Leah is about to discover that happy-ever-afters don’t always look how you expect them to… A gorgeously escapist read from the bestselling author of A Year at the French Farmhouse, perfect for fans of Veronica Henry, Jo Thomas and Fiona Valpy.
November Book of the Month
6. Saltblood by Francesa de Tores, set in the Caribbean, England and the Netherlands
In a rented room outside Plymouth in 1685, a daughter is born as her half-brother is dying. Her mother makes a decision: Mary will become Mark, and Ma will continue to collect his inheritance money. Mary’s dual existence will take her to a grand house where she’ll serve a French mistress; to the navy where she’ll learn who to trust, and how to navigate by the stars; to the army and the battlegrounds of Flanders, following her one true friend; and finding love among the bloodshed and mud. But none of this will stop her yearning for the sea.
Drawn back to the water, Mary must reinvent herself yet again, for a woman aboard a ship is a dangerous thing. This time Mary will become something more dangerous than a woman. She will become a pirate. Breathing life into the Golden Age of Piracy, Saltblood is a wild adventure, a treasure trove, weaving an intoxicating tale of gender and survival, passion and loss, journeys and transformation, through the story of Mary Read, one of history’s most remarkable figures.
More Books to Inspire Travel
Set in Crete, Kate Forsyth’s “The Crimson Thread” Explores the Ancient Legend of the Minotaur
Kate Forsyth’s novel, “The Crimson Thread”, reimagines the legend of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth myth set in Crete during WW2.
JourneyWoman Announces New Women’s Travel Book: “Never Too Late: How Women Travellers 50+ Are Making the Rules”
JourneyWoman’s Carolyn Ray and award-winning photographer Lola Akinmade are collaborating on a new travel book to inspire older women.
The Widows of Malabar Hill, Based on the Story of India’s First Female Lawyer
Inspired in part by a real woman who became India’s first female lawyer, The Widows of Malabar Hill brings us to 1920s Bombay.
This is fantastic! Thank you!
Thanks Amy – we look forward to seeing you at our meet-ups!