We all need to get away. But a vacation doesn’t have to mean an insufferable traffic jam, a transoceanic flight, or even getting a tan. The following four novels will transport you to places and lives far from those you know, unless of course you’re already an artist in Australia, an aid worker in West Africa, a documentary-film producer in Norway, or a war correspondent in the Sahara.

Henry Shukman’s Mortimer of the Maghreb (Knopf, 480 pages, $24) is an outstanding debut collection of stories that begins with the rise and fall of war reporter Charles Mortimer. An award-winning poet, travel writer, and trombonist, Shukman has created a character who is more openly flawed than Hemingway’s correspondents. But Shukman’s writing boasts a similar masculine vigor, albeit slightly more refined (he’s British, after all). Early on, he establishes Mortimer’s attraction to the desert: “Ahmoud moved slowly, with that desert economy born of unrelenting thirst. Mortimer liked that way of moving. It seemed more a way of being. Something in him loved a desert.”

Shukman’s descriptions are lyrical, passionate: “What an effect the simple press of humanity has in a desert town . . . people everywhere, so many of them . . . They create a sensation unknown in the West. The dust of multitudes drifting up as a haze into the unencumbered sky. The knowledge of the desert, the emptiness, all around. The desert forces a graphic understanding of the true human presence on the planet: a something, in a void.” The three stories that make up the second part of the book leave Mortimer and Africa behind for a businessman, an artist, and a stockbroker in the Caribbean. The setting turns out to be less idyllic than the desert: the sea “was a livid blue, with streaks of sickly green. But this morning it was more lurid than ever, as if a photographer had spilt the chemicals in the darkroom and come up with a grotesquerie of tropical colour.” The sensuality, vitality, and immediacy of Shukman’s writing land you in far corners of the world and keep you there, under a welcome weight.

More overtly sexual is Tony D’Souza’s debut novel Whiteman (Harcourt, 279 pages, $22) about an American relief worker stationed on the Ivory Coast. The book tracks Jack Diaz’s three years in Africa as he navigates village culture -- its proverbs, its genies, its customs -- and settles into its rhythms. D’Souza does well exploring the complications and contradictions of an outsider in Africa, where civil wars, hunger, and AIDS cast dark, wide shadows. Diaz is seduced by some of the African women (Djamilla “would have been beautiful anywhere”; “though AIDS was everywhere, inside Sabina it didn’t seem such a frightening thing; I ignored it, found it worth the risk”). But more so, he’s seduced by Africa itself: “I loved Africa, loved being in the fields with Bukari and his cattle, the tender hands he laid on their haunches. I loved the sound of the children singing at night, the long drape of the stars. I loved the forest and being in it. I loved it when it rained and the air was so clean it wasn’t like there was any air at all.”

In Norwegian author Jan Kjærstad’s rollicking epic The Seducer (Overlook Press, 606 pages, $27.95), a womanizing TV producer comes home to find his wife dead on the living-room floor. The book, which won Scandinavia’s top literary award, gets right to the action, the first chapter closing with: “Jonas Wergeland, standing in a room with a dead woman, caught in the colossal psychological big bang that gave birth to the universe which, in the following account, I intend to explore. For those who do not know, I ought perhaps to add that the woman on the floor was none other than his wife.” From there, Wergeland goes on a quest to find the killer. The narrator dips in here and there -- “I can tell you”, “if I might add my two penn’orth”, “I suppose I ought to mention” -- lending a conversational quality and a feeling that you’re hearing from a true storyteller.

Peter Carey’s latest novel, Theft: A Love Story (Knopf, 269 pages, $24),jets around Australia, Japan, and New York. The book involves two brothers -- the sharp and biting Butcher and the near-mad Hugh -- as well as a caluculating vixen named Marlene, in high-stakes art thievery, murder, and love. Carey, a two-time winner of the Booker Prize, alternates between the two brothers’ points of view, and, as with his other works, including My Life as a Fake, explores ideas of forgery and deceit. The story not only globetrots, it gallops, as Carey once again shows he’s a master of manufacturing worlds we can’t help but get lost in.