Corelli's Mandolin (Louis de Bernières)

My math teacher’s wife gave me this book as a graduation present before I left for three weeks in Egypt and Jordan. She insisted I wait to read until I was cruising down the Nile and told me that the first fifty pages were boring and that I should keep going. The combination of place (the banks of the Nile with Greco-Roman ruins in the near distance), the prose, and the story were absolutely unmatched.