Great Novels About Travel

Nothing beats having your own unique travel experiences, but there is something quite cool about

reading about other people’s travel experiences too. Sometimes they can inspire you, give you

insights into places that you have been, or be a cautionary tale about somewhere that you can

safely cross off your list of places to visit. Novels are particularly interesting because they are often

using travel or details about the destination to help tell a story, so while they may be evoking a

specific place or specific experiences, everything is likely to be heightened or dramatised in order

to help propel the characters through whatever story arc has been mapped out for them. In this

article we wanted to share with you some of our favourite travel novels.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

This is a slightly surreal novel but it does give you a fascinating insight into contemporary Japan.

There’s quite a bit of Japanese history in this work also – discussions about Japan’s occupation of

China and other parts of Asia. It gives you an appreciation for the weirdness and eccentricity of

Japan that somehow totally makes sense when you visit this amazing country and walk the streets

of Tokyo or Kyoto.

The Shipping News, Annie Proulx

I’ve never been to Newfoundland and after reading Annie Proulx’s gloomy and evocative novel I’m

not really sure that I want to. But you have to hand it to this author – with her spare descriptions

and limited dialogue she paints extraordinary depictions of life in this remote part of the world and

the passions of the people that it attracts.

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

If you were ever going to write a novel about being on the road then you would probably choose to

set it in the United States – a country that seems designed for long, epic journeys that don’t

necessarily need to have any purpose. Kerouac was an extraordinary character in himself, and

while On the Road is in many ways a stream-of-consciousness novel, it has become a landmark in

the Beat Generation’s impact on the American psyche.

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway wrote some amazing novels and many of them had a really strong sense of place, or

travelling, or experiencing the environment in which his characters were placed. For Whom the Bell

Tolls is one of his best – it’s tales of the Spanish Civil War can be fairly grim, but the way that he

writes about the landscapes of this region is breathtaking.

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann

I had always thought of Venice as a romantic, exciting, and glamorous kind of destination – until I

read this incredible novel by Thomas Mann. It paints a picture of Venice that is humid, filled with

decay, regret, remorse, and unfulfilled longing. It’s incredibly evocative.

Whether you have read a novel about a place that you want to visit, or you have read a novel

about a journey that you want make, ensure that you are not only living vicariously through the

imagination of novelists – get out there and have some travel adventures of your own.

Photo Credit: John Fowler under Creative Commons license. Venice at sunset.