Our Favourite Travel Books, from Fermor, Chatwin and Bryson to an out of Print Cuban Classic

Sixteen Books We Refuse to Shut Up About

Ask any of us individually for our favourite travel book and you will get sixteen different answers on sixteen different days, which is more or less how this list came together. It is unapologetically subjective, unevenly distributed across the globe, and includes at least one entry most people have never heard of, which we consider a feature rather than an oversight.

A quick note on ranking: there isn't one, and if you look closely there isn't much of an ordering system either, beyond whatever order they occurred to us in. Arguing over whether Fermor beats Chatwin is a worse use of everyone's time than just reading both, so we have declined to impose any tidier logic than that.

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

 
Fermor's prose is so ornate it occasionally requires a second read just to locate the verb, but the payoff is a Europe that no longer exists, glimpsed in its final years before it tore itself apart, aristocrats and peasants and monasteries all rendered with the same loving, slightly breathless attention. He wrote the book decades after the walk itself, working partly from diaries and partly from memory, a detail that has irritated pedants for years and bothers us not even slightly. It is the first instalment of a trilogy, the third volume of which was assembled and published only after his death, which feels about right for a writer this unhurried.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

Byron is sharp, funny and thoroughly unimpressed by anyone who cannot tell him something useful about Islamic architecture, which is most people, and his running commentary on the various diplomats and officials he encounters along the way is often crueller, and funnier, than anything written about the landscape itself. The book reads like a diary because it largely is one, assembled from entries written in real time rather than reconstructed later, and it retains an urgency because of it.

Bruce Chatwin reportedly carried a copy everywhere, which tells you something about its influence even if it does not necessarily improve your opinion of Chatwin, and Byron himself died young, in 1941, when the ship he was travelling on was torpedoed, which lends the whole book a faint retrospective poignancy he could not have intended.

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Tocqueville secured his trip by claiming to be studying the American prison system on behalf of the French government, which he was, technically, for about a fortnight before wandering off to observe everything else instead, from small-town local government to the peculiar American relationship with individualism and religion.

What he came back with is a study of American character so perceptive that political commentators still quote it as though he filed the report last week rather than in 1835. It helps, of course, that he was writing as an outsider with no particular stake in flattering his hosts, a luxury few travel writers covering their own country ever really have.

Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy

Murphy pedalled through a Persian winter cold enough to freeze the ink in her pen, was assaulted by wolves in what she describes with striking matter-of-factness, and generally treated the entire journey as a mildly inconvenient commute rather than the extraordinary feat it plainly was. It is one of the great counterarguments to the idea that solo long-distance travel by women, especially into places most guidebooks would flag as inadvisable, is a recent invention. She went on to write more than twenty further books over the following decades, and by most accounts remained just as stubborn well into her eighties.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

Markham's life reads like fiction because so much of it sounds implausible even by the standards of early twentieth century adventurers, and her writing carries the same unshowy confidence she apparently brought to flying single-engine aircraft across oceans with no radio and no functioning fuel gauge, by some accounts.

The book vanished for decades after its original publication before being rediscovered and rightly reclaimed as a classic, partly on the strength of a letter in which Hemingway reportedly admitted, with some evident irritation, that she could write circles around most professional writers he knew.

The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton

tl;dr Part philosophy, part art history, part gentle self-help, this is the book most likely to make you think differently about why you travel at all, rather than simply where to.
De Botton walks through Provence with Van Gogh, the desert with Flaubert and an airport departure lounge with a startling amount of sincerity, in a series of themed essays that somehow never tip into pretension despite drawing on more or less the entire Western canon along the way.

Our enthusiasm for the book did dim slightly upon learning he inherited a fortune worth several hundred million euros from his Swiss banker father, which does add a certain irony to a chapter about finding contentment in modest surroundings. We have chosen, mostly, to separate the book from the biography, though we will admit it is not always easy.

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Chatwin's Patagonia is stitched together from fragments, myths, digressions and a supporting cast of eccentrics he met along the way, several of whom later complained, with some justification, about how they had been portrayed, and at least one of whom accused him of straightforward fabrication.

None of that changes the fact that the writing itself is extraordinary, spare and strange in a way almost nobody has managed to copy successfully since, though plenty have tried. Read it for the sentences, in other words, and remain appropriately sceptical of everything else.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

It is a young man's account of a city and a decade both operating at some kind of creative peak, and it manages to make near-poverty in a garret apartment sound like the single most enviable lifestyle available to anyone, cafes and boxing lessons and Gertrude Stein's living room all rendered in that famously spare, deceptively simple style.

Hemingway was, by his own later admission and everyone else's, a considerably worse husband than he was a writer, though this book was written and edited with enough hindsight to be fairly kind to himself throughout, particularly regarding the eventual, entirely self-inflicted collapse of his first marriage.

Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb

Robb lived in Sicily for years before writing this, and it shows in the texture of the thing, the sense that he is not passing through so much as reporting from inside, on first-name terms with the cooks, the priests and, occasionally, people rather closer to organised crime than most travel writers would care to admit knowing.

The chapters covering the assassinations of anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 are genuinely difficult to read, in the way that only very good non-fiction about very bad events can be, and both men have since had Palermo's airport named after them, a small, hard-won kind of justice.

Chains of Heaven by Philip Marsden

tl;dr The rugged, historically dense highlands of northern Ethiopia, covered with the kind of patience and curiosity that turns a fairly niche destination into somewhere you will want to book flights to immediately.
Marsden has a talent for finding the person who knows the one story that unlocks an entire region, and northern Ethiopia, a place of rock-hewn churches, remote monasteries and centuries-old rivalries between highland clans, offers no shortage of candidates. We read this for the first time while stranded in Addis Ababa for a week over Christmas, having failed to book onward transport in advance, which added a certain bittersweet edge to reading about all the places we were not currently visiting, Lalibela chief among them.

Line in the Sand by James Barr

tl;dr Not strictly a travel book, but an account of how Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them that ought to be required reading for anyone travelling to the region.
Barr traces the rivalry between the two colonial powers with enough detail to make clear that most of the region's twentieth century instability was not some inevitable historical accident, but the direct, foreseeable result of a couple of self-interested men drawing lines on a map they barely understood the terrain of.

The infamous Sykes-Picot line itself gets less credit, or blame, than it usually receives; Barr's real interest is the decades of subsequent scheming between London and Paris that followed. It will not make you feel better about colonialism. It will make you understand it considerably more clearly.

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

tl;dr Steinbeck drives a camper van around the United States with his poodle Charley, ostensibly to rediscover the country he had spent decades writing about from memory.
It is a quieter, more melancholic book than his fiction, written by a man in his late fifties who suspected, correctly as it turned out, that he did not have all that many years left, and who wanted one more good look at the country before whatever came next.

The America he finds is already changing in ways he finds unsettling, from creeping suburban sameness to the early rumblings of the civil rights movement in the segregated South, which makes this an oddly effective companion piece to a Route 66 road trip, not least because Steinbeck himself gave that road its most famous literary nickname, in an entirely different book.

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

tl;dr A four-month train journey from London to Japan and back via India and the Trans-Siberian Railway, narrated by a man who appears to actively enjoy being irritated by almost everyone he meets.
Theroux's crankiness is precisely the point, and the book works as well as it does because he never pretends to be a more patient or generous traveller than he actually is, complaining his way across entire countries while still noticing everything worth noticing along the way. It essentially invented the modern train travelogue as a genre, and several subsequent decades of imitators have still not quite matched its balance of misanthropy and genuine wonder. Theroux himself later revisited much of the same route decades on for a sequel, apparently having mellowed only slightly with age.

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

tl;dr Bryson tours Australia and spends much of the book being amiably alarmed by its extensive catalogue of things that can kill you, which is, frankly, a completely reasonable response.
This is easily the funniest book on this list, and Bryson's particular gift is making genuine expertise, on cricket, on the country's brutal colonial history, on venomous spiders, sound like a conversation with an unusually well-read friend down the pub rather than a lecture. It is also a decent reminder that comic travel writing is much harder to do well than the serious kind, whatever the literary establishment tends to assume, since making a reader laugh out loud on public transport takes rather more craft than making them feel appropriately sombre.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris

tl;dr Less a travelogue than a long, melancholic meditation on a single strange city, and on the author's own relationship with home, identity and belonging nowhere in particular.
Trieste itself, an Italian city with an Austro-Hungarian soul and a slightly forgotten air, one of those places that has been on the wrong side of history's border changes more often than most, could not have found a more sympathetic biographer.

Morris wrote this late in her career, and it reads like someone settling a decades-long score with the one place that never quite let her go, in the gentlest possible way. If you have any affection for Trieste already, this book will make it considerably worse, in the best sense, and if you have never been, it may well send you looking at flights before you have finished the final chapter.

In Cuba by Ernesto Cardenal

tl;dr A Nicaraguan poet and priest travels through revolutionary Cuba in the late 1960s, and produces what we would argue, with no great reluctance, is the single best travel book we have ever read.
  Cardenal was already a significant literary figure and a committed liberation theologian by the time he made this trip, and it shows in a book that manages to be simultaneously devotional, political and clear-eyed about the revolution's contradictions, often within the same paragraph, sceptical without ever curdling into cynicism.

It remains criminally under-read outside specialist and Latin American literary circles, and finding a good English translation takes more effort than it really should for a book this good. That is precisely why it closes out this list rather than opening it: we needed you to read fifteen other entries first to trust us on this one.

This list has been adapted and expanded from the original, which first appeared here.