The 20 best travel books of all time
On the Road by Jack Kerouac This book should come with a health warning aimed particularly at those in their formative years: proceed with caution, you may never be able to settle in one place again. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee Laurie Lee’s lyrical account of his voyages as a young man in the 1930s is a masterpiece in English travel writing.
Coasting by Jonathan Raban Naples '44 by Norman Lewis Coasting by Jonathan Raban Coasting tells the story of the author's 4,000-mile journey around Britain in a 32-foot ketch, using only a compass for navigation. Sublime portrait of the city and its people; a starving population that has devoured all the tropical fish in the aquarium; a place where respectable women have been driven to prostitution; where he meets an extraordinary collection of characters such as the gynaecologist who "specializes in the restoration of lost virginity" and the widowed housewife who times her British lover against the clock.
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson Bill Bryson's farewell journey across the length and breadth of Britain is delivered with a combination of irreverent humour and touching nostalgia, while offering insights into our modern society. In 1960 John Steinbeck and his gregarious French poodle Charley set out in a converted pick up truck to tour the USA. The result is Travels with Charley in Search of America.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell Part political history, part autobiography, part travelogue, George Orwell’s description of the role he played in the Spanish Civil War gives one of the most vivid English-language accounts of Barcelona at that turbulent time.
Part of the 20 best travel books of all time are: The Beach by Alex Garland The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron Venice by Jan Morris In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Harper Perennial, £7.99) A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene The Journals of Captain Cook Among the Russians by Colin Thubron