We love how books take us on adventures, either to a place we know well or one we haven’t visited. Some of these books are bonafide travel books, some are written by native authors, still others are novels with a very strong setting — but they all take us somewhere.
Here is a running list of some staff favorites:
Australia
Notes from a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson
The Balkans
Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West
Canada
The Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies
The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence
Anne of Green Gables, by L M Montgomery
Chile
Daughter of Fortune, by Isabelle Allende
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda
Travels in a Thin Country, by Sara Wheeler
China
The Shanghai Free Taxi, by Frank Langfitt
Colombia
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
Czech Republic
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
France
My Life in France, by Julia Child
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
Paris to the Moon, by Adam Gopnik
A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
Germany
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson
Greece
The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson
India
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse
Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri
An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India, by VS Naipaul
Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Ireland
The Dubliners, by James Joyce
Italy
Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr
Room with a View, by EM Forester
Mexico
Cristo en Cuernavaca (Christ in Cuernavaca), by Howard Fast
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
The Children of Sanchez, by Oscar Lewis
El ABC de Las y Los Mexicanos, by Guadalupe Loaeza
Distant Neighbors, by Alan Riding
Morocco
Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
The Harem Within: Tales of a Moroccan Girlhood, by Fatima Mernissi
The Netherlands
The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank
New Zealand
The Luminaries, by Eleanor Cattan
Peru
Turn Right at Machu Picchu, by Mark Adams
Peruvian Traditions, by Ricardo Palma
Russia
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
South Africa
The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay
Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela
Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah
Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton
Spain
Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Turkey
Istanbul, by Orhan Pamuk
United Kingdom
Notes from a Small Island, by Bill Bryson
Once and Future King, by TH White
Code of the Woosters, by PG Wodehouse
General Travel
A Cook’s Tour, by Anthony Bourdain
Art of Travel, by Alain De Botton
The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner