Best Travel Books

Young Gerald Durrell's account of five years living on Corfu with his eccentric family in the 1930s — a childhood paradise of wildlife, sunshine, and complete freedom to roam.

Peter Matthiessen and zoologist George Schaller trek 250 miles into the Himalayas to study the bharal (Himalayan blue sheep) and their predator, the nearly mythical snow leopard — a physical journey that becomes a meditation on grief, Zen Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness.

New Yorker editor Bill Buford quits his job to apprentice in Mario Batali's chaotic Babbo kitchen, then traces Italian cooking to its source — apprenticing with a Tuscan butcher and a pasta master in Emilia-Romagna.

Bruce Chatwin's account of travelling through Patagonia — the vast, wind-scoured southern cone of South America — in search of a piece of skin he remembered from his grandmother's cabinet, which turned out to belong to a mylodon.

Before moving back to America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson makes a farewell tour of the country that adopted him — by bus, train, and foot, from Dover to the Highlands — in search of what makes Britain lovably, infuriatingly, irreducibly itself.

Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer escapes a British prisoner-of-war camp in India during World War II and, after a twenty-one-month crossing of the Himalayas, reaches Lhasa — where he becomes a tutor and friend to the young Dalai Lama as the Chinese invasion closes in.

A practical and philosophical guide to long-term travel — arguing that extended independent travel is not a luxury but a choice, and that most people can afford it if they are willing to rethink their relationship to money, time, and consumer culture.

Peter Mayle and his wife abandon advertising careers in England to restore a farmhouse in the Luberon region of Provence — and spend a year navigating unpredictable tradesmen, extraordinary markets, and a way of life entirely organised around food.

Paul Theroux, one of the great travel writers in the English language, travels overland from Cairo to Cape Town — by bus, truck, ferry, and train — through some of the most troubled and beautiful countries in Africa, forty years after teaching there as a Peace Corps volunteer.

In 1952, twenty-three-year-old medical student Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set off on a motorcycle to travel the length of South America — a nine-month, 8,000-mile journey that transformed the future revolutionary's understanding of his continent.

A desk-bound travel editor retraces Hiram Bingham's 1911 journey to Machu Picchu through the Peruvian Andes, interweaving his own misadventures with the controversial history of the 'discovery' that wasn't.

A radical reorientation of world history centered on the Silk Roads — the trade routes connecting East and West — arguing that Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia have been the world's true centers for most of recorded history.

The story of Christopher McCandless, a young man from a privileged background who walked into the Alaskan wilderness alone in 1992 — and was found dead in an abandoned bus four months later.

After the collapse of her marriage and her mother's death, Cheryl Strayed impulsively hiked 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone — unprepared, grieving, and ultimately transformed.

After a painful divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert spends a year travelling — eating in Italy, praying in India, and finding love in Bali — in this memoir that became one of the bestselling travel narratives of the century.

Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty — alter egos of Kerouac and Neal Cassady — drive back and forth across America in search of sensation, connection, and the meaning of the American road.

Anne Lamott's spiritual memoir traces her journey from alcoholism and despair to faith, motherhood, and community — a funny, honest, and fiercely unsentimental account of finding grace in the most ordinary places.

The second volume of Gerald Durrell's Corfu trilogy continues the story of the Durrell family's years on the Greek island. With the same warmth and comic genius as the first, it introduces more extraordinary animals and eccentric characters.

Actor Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman ride motorcycles east from London through Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, and Alaska to New York — 31,000 miles through some of the most extreme terrain on earth.

The third and final volume of Gerald Durrell's Corfu trilogy, completing the story of the family's years on the Greek island before the outbreak of World War II drove them back to England.

Gerald Durrell's account of his third Cameroon expedition, during which he collected animals specifically to found his own zoo on the island of Jersey — the origin of what became the Jersey Zoo and Wildlife Preservation Trust.