Journeys in literature
As the holiday season gets under way in earnest, Guardian writers remember their favourite literary travels
The Swimmer by John Cheever – into a suburban darkness
This classic tale has echoes of many other great stories, but stands on its own as a portrait of a disintegrating man
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers – a road trip to adulthood
Brilliant and infuriating, this dizzying memoir combines flamboyant verbal fireworks with an all too sober account of grief and growing up
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles – a cautionary tale for tourists
This account of a jaundiced progress around north Africa is a bleak reminder of the perils that lie within the romantic idea of travel
Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame – travelling home, around the world
A novella reimagining the author’s ‘roots crisis’ is a sharp drama of fleeing, and missing, home
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan – giddy action and vivid cameos
The somewhat clumsy escapades that lead the reader through this spy caper are steadied by the wonderfully sharp incidental characters
The Crystal World by JG Ballard – a petrified apocalypse
A voyage to a mysterious forest leads its hero to a violent yet beautiful fate
Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson – travels with a solitary soul
This extraordinary book is a journey into loneliness that encompasses all the stuff of life
Tristia by Ovid – high drama and hoax
A thundering account of the poets tempest-tossed exile, this fascinating journey may not have actually taken place
The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins – walking through the past
This eccentric but rigorous study of lost routes across England draws on archaeology and etymology, but is shot through with a compelling poetry
Edge of the World by Michael Powell – a gripping voyage into the past
The film director’s story of making The Edge of the World, a tale of a vanishing world, is itself a trip into a lost realm
Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss – melancholy anthropology
This careful account of an encounter with a very foreign people is freighted with great sadness at the colonial legacy his subjects bear
The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning – a fraught trip through wartime Europe
There’s no glamour in this desperate journey across a dangerous continent, the advancing Nazis close behind
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald – walking through history
Riffing on a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, this book expands into a grand meditation on the past
Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro – a place familiar but lost
My grandmother also came from small-town Ontario, and my memories chime with Munro’s tales of passionate girls and women with stifled passions
My Life As an Explorer by Sven Hedin - the great unknown
An intrepid traveller’s tales from the days when Terra Incognita still existed make thrilling and terrifying reading
Changing Places by David Lodge - the campus novel in full flight
The first of David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy is formally daring and filled with forgotten glamour from the early days of mass air travel
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
A cowboy’s odyssey into a vanished world was a poignant companion in Scotland’s Hebrides, where the bleak and beautiful coexist, and family ties are woven from ancient, comforting cloth
Gerald Brenan’s Personal Record 1920-1972 - battles with nature and invisibility
A bookish young man’s solitary journey to Andalucia – to devote himself to reading – inspired me to make my own literary escape
The Voyage of QV66 by Penelope Lively
A children’s book that makes no concessions to younger readers, this superlative animal adventure leads you on an unforgettable trip
The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
Country walks will never be the same again after an encounter with this eye-opening masterpiece of seeing and imagining
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