Best travel books of all time: see our top holiday picks
Before you’ve even arrived at your destination, you can get swept up in the sounds, smells, tastes and colours of a place, all from the pages of a great travel book.
For many, reading a novel about where they’re headed is the best way to choose where they want to go, what they want to try to experience, and what they want to eat, often well beyond what a brochure or website can offer. It can help you decide where you’re going next, too.
By seeing the vibrant back streets of Mexico City through the eyes of Jack Kerouac and his Beat characters Sal and Dean Moriarty, you can hear the jazz and taste the tequila as you flip through their chaotic nights out in On The Road. The Great Railway Bazaar will take you by train across several continents, from London to Japan, without you ever having to leave your seat; and Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron can introduce you to the history and cultures along the ancient trade route. Whether driving for miles across the wild plains of Africa, spotting nothing but wildebeest, or flowing through the lowlands of the Amazon rainforest on an old riverboat, we can all be armchair travellers.
Stories evoke a sense of place and reveal secrets about a destination, so here's our selection of inspiring novels set in foreign lands, from Alaska to Papua New Guinea, to help you revisit a treasured spot or discover somewhere new.
How to choose the best travel book
Obviously, the book you take on holiday doesn’t have to be about the country you’re visiting; however, choosing one that is can be a real joy, and give you a deeper understanding of the culture, history and colour of a place. There’s no one book that’s right for everyone, so selecting a read that takes you on the journey you’re searching for is a highly personal thing – just don’t choose a book by its cover, if you’re looking for something historically accurate research the author first, and take your pick from one of the following travel books we’ve included on our list, because they’re all exceptional.
Books that make you want to travel
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
Read it before you go to: the USA, on a road trip
“Nearly every American hungers to move.”
The book that is probably Steinbeck’s most endearing is not only a love letter to the USA, it’s also an ode to our innate desire and need to travel, and the joy and lifeblood it can breathe into us. “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike,” he says. “And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” At age 58, Steinbeck couldn’t fight his restlessness and, feeling he no longer knew or understood his country outside of New York, he hit the road for a year in a camper van, which he christened Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse. This riveting travelogue describes the many people he met along the way, the social and cultural patterns he noticed, the changing landscapes and seasons – and his heart-warming relationship with his sidekick, Charley the poodle.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Marquez
Read it before you go to: Cartagena, Colombia
“From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena des Indias, the most beautiful in the world.”
This is a book to start when you’re far away from your daily routine; it’s one worth taking the time to get immersed in it. Ten-minute bursts on the tube won’t do if you’re to keep up with Marquez’s lyrical language, which is crammed with detail, just like every cobbled street in Cartagena’s Old Town. Magical realism comes close to reality in this city where the balconies of rainbow-coloured houses heave with bougainvillaea, where locals knock back fiery aguardiente neat before noon, where squares shimmy to life with spinning salsa dancers at night.
Here, an epic love story unfolds over the course of a lifetime, and a passionate romance laced with an ugly seediness seems to crawl out from the very walls of this Spanish-colonial city on the Caribbean sea.
A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemingway
Read it before you go to: Paris
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
This retrospective memoir by the American author documents his time as a struggling writer in Paris during the early 1920s. He talks about the everyday: the tables being washed down outside the cafés of Saint Germain first thing in the morning, lunches of cheese and baguette, on the days he can afford to eat – in some ways, it is a very simple book about a city. But it's also a tale of the luminaries, including F Scott Fitzgerald, whom he meets along the way. Hemingway writes about the nature of love, and of the passing of time, with every sentence excruciatingly calculated in its simplicity.
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
Read it before you go to: New York
“Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are. You are awed by his strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of pleasure.”
New York in the 1980s was a place of rampant corruption, extraordinary violence and moral degradation. It also boasted the best nightlife in all human history. McInerney’s novel is supposed to be a takedown of the city’s crass materialism, but he is too in love with the target of his satire to make any of the charges stick. Because really, this is a paean to Manhattan and its glorious, degraded glamour. The second person narration – ‘You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time in the morning’ – drags you in from the first page before you know it you are overcome with an urgent desire to stalk the Lower East Side at 6am, the consequences be damned.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
Read it before you go to: Ionian islands, Greece
“Once the eyes have adjusted to the extreme vestal chastity of this light, the light of any other place is miserable and dank by comparison; it is nothing more than something to see by, a disappointment, a blemish. Even the seawater of Cephalonia is easier to see through than the air of any other place.”
The year is 1941, and even the idyllic paradise of Cephalonia is not immune to the onslaught of the Second World War. With the arrival of Italian Captain Antonio Corelli, the young and beautiful Pelagia is torn between a new suitor and her Greek fisherman fiancé, Mandras. As war sweeps the island, desire builds, and “a love delayed is a lust augmented.” The pages burn with the heat of passion, the rage of war and the scorch of the sun. Against all this action, the mythical beauty of the island becomes even more patent, a landscape that jingles with the bells of rambling goats, sways like a breeze through twisting olive groves and dances with bobbing fishing boats in blue seas.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Read it before you go to: Naples or Ischia
“In that period it became a daily exercise: the better off I had been in Ischia, the worse off Lila had been in the desolation of the neighbourhood; the more I had suffered upon leaving the island, the happier she had become. It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.”
The author, who shuns publicity and whose identity remains a mystery, captures the grittiness of southern Italy on every page of this four-part series. The chaotic tale of friendship begins in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples in the 1950s. And through the lives of two girls, Elena and Lila, the story of a city is told in a way that transforms the relationships of the protagonists too. The star of the show, though, is Ischia. The 17-square-mile island, just an hour’s ferry from Naples, is where Elena spends one memorable summer, fleeing from the heat and poverty of Naples.
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Read it before you go: on an American road trip
“In reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
Into the Wild follows the heartbreaking internal struggle of Christopher McCandless, an Emory University graduate and the son of wealthy parents, who abandons all ties to modern-day society in search of freedom and happiness in nature. From kayaking down the dusty Colorado River, prancing on branches on the Pacific Coast Trail, running with wild horses in South Dakota, dancing on Salvation Mountain, to walking waist-deep in freezing water down the Stampede Trail in Alaska, this book will inspire a road trip through the American southwest or California.
The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark
Read it before you go to: Italy
“I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don’t.”
There are books that inspire you to travel, and then there are books that make you question why exactly you travel in the first place. The Driver’s Seat is an oddity of a novella, a short, staccato film noir, a crime story that’s not a crime story, about a woman, Lise, who flees 16 years of working in the same accountants’ office for an unnamed city in Italy. She dresses in garish, clashing colours – a yellow top, a skirt patterned with blue, mauve and orange, with a red-and-white-striped coat on top – so clashing that the porter of her hotel laughs at her. In her hands is a book she describes as “a whydunnit in q-sharp and it has a message.” Though, actually, that works pretty well as a description of Spark's own work. Dark, witty and really quite disturbing.
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Read it before you go to: Italy, Indonesia, India – or anywhere solo
“I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.”
Often dismissed as light-hearted chick-lit, Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir of her travels through Italy, India and Bali will have you salivating over pizza in Naples and checking into an ashram, such is the power of her words. There’s plenty of soul-searching, sure, but there’s also humour, friendship and a bucket load of satisfying symbolism found in the most unlikely of places.
Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje
Read it before you go to: Sri Lanka
“From ten until noon we sit talking and drinking ice-cold palmyras toddy from a bottle we have filled in the village. This is a drink which smells of raw rubber and is the juice drained from the flower of a coconut. We sip it slowly, feeling it continue to ferment in the stomach.”
There are so many extraordinary, evocative, almost sensual depictions of Sri Lanka in the country’s novels. But, turn to Michael Ondaatje to take you straight to the intoxicating tropical heat of an island where everything smells of coconut oil (from the street-side cooking to the slick sheen of schoolgirls’ plaits). The novel is ostensibly fiction, a constructed memoir, but Ondaatje spent his childhood in Colombo and clearly draws heavily on that. His depiction of the family network within Sri Lankan society is vivid and vibrant. You can feel the drops of sweat, hear the buzzing, chirping, barking sounds of the steamy nights, as the dialogue intersperses itself with anecdotes and chapters of poetry. It’s magic. And gets better on the second, third, and fourth reading. Or you can follow on with the numerous award-winning Anil’s Ghost for a narrative rooted in the harrowing shadow of the country’s civil war.
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Read it before you go to: Mumbai
“The open windows of our battered bus gave us the aromas of spices, perfumes, diesel smoke, and the manure of oxen, in a steamy but not unpleasant mix, and voices rose up everywhere above ripples of unfamiliar music. Every corner carried gigantic posters, advertising Indian films.”
The story goes that the manuscript for Shantaram was destroyed. Twice. By prison guards. But author Gregory David Roberts persisted, penning one of the longest travel tomes about India, and more specifically, Mumbai. It’s a (supposedly) autobiographical love story in which Roberts falls for a woman and a city, intoxicated by life in the slums and a hefty amount of opium. It’s raw, romantic and revealing of some of Mumbai’s inner workings – the good, the bad and the really, really ugly – and it’s utterly compelling.
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
Read it before you go to: Amsterdam
“Looming above the sludge-coloured canal, the houses are a phenomenon. Admiring their own symmetry on the water, they are stately and beautiful, jewels set within the city’s pride. Above their rooftops Nature is doing her best to keep up, and clouds in colours of saffron and apricot echo the spoils of the glorious republic.”
From a quiet, rural childhood, Nella Oortman finds herself delivered via marriage to a grand townhouse on the Herengracht. Here she navigates a city bubbling with dangerous contradictions, where the repressive atmosphere of the Protestant Reformation mingles with excessive wealth, prolific trade and greed. With vivid description, Jessie Burton conjures an image of Amsterdam as beautifully as a Vermeer painting, from the bustling canals to the Dutch East India Company’s dockside warehouses to the sugary bakeries and the intricacies of life within the merchants’ houses in the glittering Golden Age. Visit the Rijks Museum and see for yourself the doll's house of Petronella (Nella) Oortman that inspired the book.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Read it before you go to: East Africa
“In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own.”
The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of an American missionary family that moves to the Congo in the late 1950s – a time of political instability as the country fought to shake off colonial rule. This is a book that brings Africa alive; the flavours, the smells, the sense of community, the jungle, the reverence for nature. Set against a background of racism and oppression, as the family’s tale unravels, an initially alien world becomes multi-faceted and familiar. And while the family is fictional, many of the events in their story – from the Congolese Independence ceremony to the assassination of politician Patrice Lumumba – actually happened, making it an interesting insight into the area's history too.
Footsteps by Richard Holmes
Read it before you go to: the South of France
“Then I went down to the Loire, here little more than a stream, and sat naked in a pool cleaning my teeth. Behind me the sun came out and the woodfire smoke turned blue. I felt rapturous and slightly mad.”
In 1964, when he was just 18, Richard Holmes, the future biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, decided to recreate Robert Louis Stevenson’s twelve-day hike recorded in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. He then ventures to Paris during the tumult of ’68, an homage to Mary Wollstonecraft’s similar journey across the Channel in search of revolutionary fervour. Part autobiography, part biography, part hymn to the glory of France (and Italy in a later trip following Shelley), Footsteps is occasionally thrilling and always hilarious. Reading the book leaves you rapturous and utterly mad with the urge to travel.
Around India in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh
Read it before you go to: India
“To understand India you have to see it, hear it, breathe it and feel it. Living through the good, the bad and the ugly is the only way to know where you fit in and where India fits into you.”
Rajesh spent four months travelling around India by train to try and get to know a country that had become a stranger to her. In that time, she covered just over 40,000km – almost the circumference of the Earth. Whether she’s trundling on a toy train to Darjeeling, hanging out of a rammed Mumbai local or watching cataract surgery on a hospital train, the author evokes sounds, smells and tastes that make you feel like you’re riding alongside her. Being a British Indian, she’s both an insider and outsider: explaining mannerisms, translating conversation, and engaging her fellow passengers with wonderful wit and humour. Aside from being a hilarious travelogue, the book explains how to negotiate the railway ticketing system, which trains have the best food, and uncovers beautiful places off the typical tourist trail.
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
Read it before you go to: Cornwall, Devon or Dorset, England
“Sometimes, you have to walk through the darkness to get to the light.”
The South West Coastal Path is a 630-mile hiking trail that leads adventurous spirits through rugged headlands, secluded beaches, dramatic cliffs and rolling hills, all with a backdrop of the Celtic Sea.
This route is particularly well-known for being a challenge people take on when wanting time to slow down, reconnect with nature, and find some time for reflection, which is exactly what’s shared with compelling and heart-warming honesty in the Sunday Times Bestseller (and soon to be Netflix series), The Salt Path. It’s a true story of grief, loss and the healing power of nature, set into motion when Raynor and her husband, Moth, learn of a shocking terminal diagnosis and face the threat of homelessness. Together, they make a snap decision to take this life-affirming hike from Somerset to Dorset to rediscover themselves, each other and their zest for life.
When you read this book, you take the journey with them, sharing in their pride, resilience, heartbreak and hope along the way.
The Beach by Alex Garland
Read it before you go to: Koh Phangan, Thailand
“The beach was a perfect place, and I had always wanted to be somewhere perfect, somewhere you could truly be free.”
This 1996 cult classic novel turned Leo DiCaprio led blockbuster and All Saints chart-topper, reveals the best, and worst, of an apparent paradise. Thankfully, it’s an extremely unlikely scenario you’d ever really encounter on a trip to Thailand. Still, the gripping, dark storytelling is enthralling, while the descriptions of the idyllic setting that lures our unsuspecting protagonist in are, in fact, quite accurate.
Like so many of us, the main character yearns for freedom and escape from normality. When he follows a map and lands on a hidden island, he thinks he’s found it. However, as the story unfolds, his search for an unattainable ideal leads him into a trap of disillusionment, isolation and danger.
Scenes of secret lagoons, freshwater falls, untouched jungle and bioluminescent ocean give you a taste of the otherworldly beauty that awaits you on the island of Koh Phangan – a place that needs to be seen to be believed. Just steer clear of any invites to live in Edenic communities while you’re there…
An African Love Story: Love, Life and Elephants by Dame Daphne Sheldrick
Read it before you go to: Kenya, Africa
“I have always believed that when you love something, you must also be prepared to let it go. I have let go of many elephants, and with each one, a part of me has gone with them. But in return, I have received a gift beyond measure—the privilege of knowing and loving these magnificent creatures.”
Author of this book, the late Daphne Sheldrick, was a real-life hero of our time, one of the world’s greatest conservationists who saved the lives of countless orphaned elephants – and continues to do so even after death, with the legacy she left behind.
Daphne’s memoir takes you on a journey with Sheldrick’s grandparents, immigrating from England to Kenya and her time as a child playing in Biltong camps, until she meets the love of her life, wildlife warden David Shedrick. It’s at this point that her vocation comes to life, as they embark on an adventure together to protect African wildlife in Tsavo National Park and build remarkable connections with orphaned elephants whose mothers’ lives were lost at the hands of poachers.
In this inspirational book, you’ll learn about the value of conservation, the deeply emotional and rewarding experience of caring for animals, of love, devotion, and loss. And if you’re heading to Kenya, you can even visit the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust today, and meet the elephant families that survive thanks to Daphne’s lifetime of work.