Book Bingo NW 2025: Great Escapes

Perhaps more than any other Book Bingo category this year, Great Escapes invites personal taste and creativity into the conversation. A guidebook to somewhere you’ve always wanted to visit? A portal to a world you wish you could escape to? A memoir of around-the-world travel? A gripping thriller or sigh-worthy romance that gives you an escape from your regular life? All this and anything you might consider an escapist read are fair game!

For a spirited adventure novel that will take you to 11th century Italy and onto the high seas, check out Nicked by M.T. Anderson. This rollicking tale follows Nicephorus, a Benedictine monk in Bari, who has a dream of St. Nicholas (yes, that Saint Nick) that then leads to a quest to dig up the body of the Saint and bring it back to Bari to drive up tourism and cure the population of the pox. Along with a noted relic hunter and his dog-man sidekick, they head out to the Byzantine Empire on an offbeat but action-packed adventure. The slowest-burn gay pining subplot adds a sweetness to this strangely endearing story. It’s also shockingly based on real events!

If you want your escape to include time travel, romance, spies, and critique of colonialism (and who doesn’t), Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is here for you. The unnamed narrator works for the British Ministry of Defence and is tapped to help start a new division dedicated to process time travelers from the past. She doesn’t expect to develop feelings for her “expat,” the real-life polar explorer Lieutenant Graham Gore, but the two must work together to navigate the new inventions since Gore’s 19th century prior life.

Escape can be literal, like in A Well-trained Wife, a memoir by Tia Levings chronicling her upbringing and eventual escape from Christian fundamentalism. Levings details her marriage at 19 to an abusive man whose patriarchal control only increased in their time together, sanctioned by the Church to which they belonged. As the Internet progressed in the mid-2000s, she discovered a community of more liberal Christian women and eventually was able to flee with her children. Since then, Levings has devoted her time to exposing the dangers of fundamentalist religious life and trying to help other women in a similar position.

The fantasy world in Emma Törzs’s debut novel Ink Blood Sister Scribe has a lot in common with our world. In fact, the Vermont and London settings seem very real, except for the curious twist that the characters in this book are part of a select few who know about the existence of magical spellbooks created with the blood and bodies of people known as Scribes. Add to this intriguing premise generations of family trauma, estranged sisters, and secrets upon secrets, and you’ve got the recipe for a can’t-put-down urban fantasy just waiting for you to escape into.

Speaking of family secrets, Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson is full of them! After the death of their mother, estranged siblings Benny and Byron come together for an unexpected inheritance: a slice of their mother’s famous Caribbean black cake and a voice recording that upends their lives completely. Moving across the world from the Caribbean to London to California, the lush writing lets the reader escape into as many different settings and lives as their mom once lived.

For more Great Escapes, check out the KCLS staff-created booklist: Book Bingo NW 2025 – Great Escapes.

~posted by Jane S.

For more ideas for books to meet your Summer Book Bingo challenge, follow our Shelf Talk BookBingoNW2025 series or check the hashtag #BookBingoNW2025 on social media. Book Bingo is presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures and the King County Library System.

  Perhaps more than any other Book Bingo category this year, Great Escapes invites personal taste and creativity into the conversation. A guidebook to somewhere you’ve always wanted to visit? A portal to a world you wish you could escape to? A memoir of around-the-world travel? A gripping thriller or sigh-worthy romance that gives you an … Continue reading “Book Bingo NW 2025: Great Escapes” 

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