Reading has the magical ability to transport you to another world.
It has not only helped to challenge our brains and improve our intellect, but it also allowed us to escape from our own thoughts for a moment or two. As mere tots, we were subtly taught the notion that journeys don’t always have to be physically taken.
Just as we can conjure up an image in our mind’s eye from the wonderful words we read on a page, stories can take us on a metaphorical journey within our own consciousness into a world of deeper, more universal understanding.
While travel memoirs and essays have a unique power to take us somewhere very real through a writer’s own lived experiences, fictional novels which take place in unknown lands have the uncanny power to achieve the very same effect.
As such, we’re not just going to include your classic travel memoirs in this article. Rather, we’ll introduce you to a series of wonderful novels both fiction and non-fiction that you would have never expected to inspire a sense of wanderlust.
Keep scrolling for a round-up of some of the best travel books of all time. Perhaps they’ll inspire your next trip abroad, or perhaps they’ll provide a transformative experience from the comfort of your own home. Either way, you’re in for some self-searching and discovery.
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A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain
Arguably one of the best ways to delve into another culture, food is stuff of life. Wherever you travel, there are communities and societies who have learned to feed themselves in uniquely mouth-watering and equally repulsive ways. A legendary figure both in the world of food and of literature, in A Cook’s Tour, Anthony Bourdain writes of his travels as he eats his way from Saigon to Cambodia, Russia to Saint Sebastian, rural Mexico to the Napa Valley and so much more.
Buy now £14.99, Waterstones
A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar
This Pulitzer prize-winning novel follows the journey of a grief-stricken Hisham Matar and his journey in coming to terms with the disappearance and presumed death of his Libyan father. Matar finds himself drawn to the contemplative power of art as a coping mechanism, and we follow along as the author immerses himself in the city of Siena, its historical art, architecture, showing the power of escaping from the present moment into a world of transient beauty.
Buy now £9.99, Waterstones
Americana, Don De Lillo
One of the foremost writers of postmodern fiction, De Lillo’s first novel marks the author’s foray into the bizarre and tumultuous landscape of contemporary American life. From the soulless concrete machine of New York City to the sleepy and static world of the American mid-west, De Lillo takes us on a journey through post-war America through the eyes of protagonist David Bell.
Much like a wannabe Joan Didion, Bell is on a mission to document the lives of small-town citizens across the country. Yet all that our main character seems to discover is the overwhelming chasm of nothingness of modern life in the US.
Buy now £9.19, Amazon
Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
A fast-paced novel filled with eye-wateringly thrilling adventures, it’s hard to comprehend that Shantaram is, in fact, a true story. Though Roberts refers to Shantaram as a novel, it is strongly autobiographic and is based on his escape from an Australian prison to India in the early 80s.
From setting up a free health clinic in a Bombay slum and joining the mafia, to learning Hindi and Marathi, falling in love, appearing in Bollywood and fighting with the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan – it’s unbelievable to think that the author managed to come out of his multifarious experiences alive.
Buy now £10.99, Waterstones
The Roads to Sata, Alan Booth
For an undeniably esoteric glimpse into the microcosmic culture of Japan outside the buzzling metropolitan cities, look no further than The Roads to Sata by Alan Booth. One springtime in the early 1970s, Booth decided to leave England to travel the entire length of Japan by foot. From the island’s northernmost point in Soya to Sata in the deep south, Booth encounters the many faces of rural Japan, recounting bizarre and hilarious stories as well as the transformative experiences elicited by his pilgrimage.
Buy now £10.99, Waterstones
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
It’s no wonder that Krakauer’s novel was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year before being adapted into a gut-wrenchingly beautiful Hollywood film. The 1996 non-fiction novel is an expansion of an essay written By Christopher Johnson McCandless in 1993, titled “Death of an Innocent.”
Writing of the desire to leave the life he’s known behind to live off the land in rural America, McCandless eventually did just that. In 1992, he donated his college savings to charity and walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer expands on the young adventurer’s failed mission with a compassionate insight and emotionally provocative candour, writing of the stresses and strains of modern life which result in a desire to reconnect with nature in this most nomadic manner.
Buy now £7.43, Amazon
New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time, Craig Taylor
Have you ever found yourself scrolling through the wonderfully unique and diverse stories told first-hand and recorded by Brandon Stanton’s iconic Humans of New York? If so, you won’t be able to put this book down. Writing of the immense challenges that the metropolis has faced over the last two decades, Taylor records the stories of the workers who kept the city together during its most trying times.
Buy now £7.79, Amazon
The Salt Path, Raynor Winn
After author Raynor Winn and her husband of 32 years, Moth, learn that he is terminally ill – the couple embark on a 630-mile coastal walk from Somerset to Dorset via Devon and Cornwall. Carrying only the bare minimum to survive, we’re taken along a journey throughout which their unconditional love for one another triumphs over all that has gone wrong in their lives. This powerful emotional crucible is set against the wondrous and subline natural landscape which they are wildly inhabiting, reflecting the power of the nature in the process of convalescence.
Winn also wrote a follow-up book named The Wild Silence, which she wrote after the couple’s epic journey came to an end.
Buy now £10.99, Waterstones
Lines in the Sand: Collected Journalism, Adrian Gill
Adrian Anthony Gill was a British journalist hailed for his food and travel writing. This collected works follows a range of subjects which take our author across the globe as he philosophises over food, global political crises, what it means to be a European and – in the book’s final two essays – Gill’s feelings about the cancer diagnosis which eventually resulted in his tragically untimely death.
Buy now £9.99, Waterstones
Two Towns in Provence, M.F.K Fisher
Seminal food biographer M.F.K Fisher lived in many towns and cities across France and beyond which she has written of in her expansive oeuvre. This book brings together two of her celebrated works, Map of Another Town and A Considerable Town, throughout which she writes of the habits and minutiae that make these two French cities so inimitable, and so fit for a true gourmand (as Fisher would say).
Buy now £3.75, Amazon
South and West, Joan Didion
Even though South and West is only really a collection of notes and musings about Didion’s travels throughout the American deep South, her incomparable insight and ability to delve into the deepest corners of societal prejudices and idiosyncratic behaviours shines through as though this text is the polished final edition of a novel that has been worked on for decades.
Writing of the sticky and often sickly heat which encompasses the vast majority of towns and cities in the South, Didion at once reveals the sense of claustrophobia she feels not only because of the weather, but also the strange flat contentedness that its citizens feel in their unenviable positions. This, followed by her musings of California, makes for a strangely complete reflection on the polarities of the United States that is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s where the book is set.
Buy now £6.72, Amazon
