Best Travel Writing Books

Naipaul's account of his first visit to India — the ancestral homeland he had carried as an idea throughout his Trinidadian childhood. What he found was a place of overwhelming complexity, poverty, and social denial that he could neither embrace as home nor dismiss as foreign. A devastating and controversial travel memoir.

Gerald Durrell's account of his second animal-collecting expedition to the British Cameroons in 1949, and his extraordinary friendship with the Fon of Bafut — a remarkable ruler with a taste for whisky and dancing.

Theroux's account of his four-month train journey from London through Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Siberia — the trip that established him as the foremost travel writer of his generation. Grumpy, funny, observant, and occasionally uncomfortable in ways that proved influential.

Paul Theroux's classic travelogue of a journey by train from Boston to the tip of South America. Riding the rails through the Americas to the remote Patagonian express, Theroux observes landscapes, fellow passengers, and his own restlessness with the sharp eye and acerbic wit that made him a master of travel writing.

Before The Alchemist, there was the pilgrimage. Paulo Coelho's account of walking the Road to Santiago de Compostela — the ancient Spanish pilgrimage route — and the spiritual lessons his guide Petrus taught him along the way. Part memoir, part spiritual manual, part adventure, this is the book that made Coelho a writer.

Mark Adams travels the world in search of the lost city of Atlantis — interviewing scholars, crackpots, archaeologists, and believers — in a witty and surprisingly serious investigation of one of history's most persistent myths.