WW2 crime mystery set in Canterbury, Kent (and London)
Ten Great TRAVELOGUES
13th November 2025
Ten Great Travelogues.
A travelogue is more than a list of visited sights; it is a blend of autobiography, ethnography, and literature. Capturing a journey through the writer’s personal lens, it translates foreign landscapes, cultures, and encounters into vivid narratives, reflecting how a place transforms the traveller just as much as how the traveller perceives the place. At its heart, a great travelogue bridges the unfamiliar with the universal, turning a physical map into a very human story.
Here is a listing of 10 of our absolute favourite books in this category
Find and Seek New York by Sally Roydhouse – NEW YORK
When a child steps outside their ordinary world and travels to a foreign city or country, an adventure awaits. In Find and Seek New York a small boy arrives in the city of New York with his family, willing to explore his new surroundings with an open heart and a spirit of wonder. All senses are activated as we are taken on his adventure and discover what is the New York City experience through the eyes of a child. Universal themes of travel, exposure to new cultures, and a sense of discovery are pertinent to the story. His adventure will leave an impression on the reader’s memory to keep, and hopefully ignite a love of travel in this diverse world in which we live. Find and Seek New York is colourful, educational, and easy to read, and is an enjoyable tale for all members of the family. It is an ideal read before visiting the city or a take-away keepsake.
False Calm by Maria Sonia Cristoff – PATAGONIA
Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm finds Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia as she journeys from one small town to the next.
Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. She explores Patagonia’s complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and firsthand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld.
Getting Lost On My Way by Diane Hartman – WESTERN IRELAND
When an introverted, divorced, middle-aged mother and school librarian from the Midwest decides to leave her comfort zone and travel alone to Ireland, her desire to fulfill her dream overcomes her fear as she immerses herself into what will become an adventure of courage and self-discovery.
Motivated by her love of Irish music and Celtic spirituality, along with her desire to find healing from depression and divorce, Diane sets off for Ireland, a country she’s been obsessed with for years. Her romantic preconceptions of the Emerald Isle quickly clash with reality, however, and while there she faces many obstacles, including driving the narrow, ill-marked roads throughout the countryside she traverses. Nevertheless, this first sojourn leads to three more trips over the next six years, and she gradually learns to navigate Ireland’s back roads—not to mention her own personal and spiritual roads toward self-discovery and acceptance.
This heartfelt and humorous account of Diane’s adventures—including hanging out with an Irish rock band, traveling remote roads in search of a hermit nun, and meeting her favorite Irish musician not once but twice—is sure to inspire readers to get outside their own comfort zones and take some rewarding risks of their own.
France Sketchbooks by Laurie Olin – FRANCE
For centuries artists and designers have recorded places, people, and life in travel sketchbooks. Over a period of fifty years, Laurie Olin, one of America’s most distinguished landscape architects, has recorded aspects of France: its cities and countryside, streets and cafés, ancient ruins, vineyards, and parks – from humble to grand, things that interested his designer’s eye – taking the time to see things carefully. Paris in its seasons, agriculture in Provence and Bordeaux, trees, dogs, and fountains, all are noted over the years in watercolour or pen and ink.
Originally intended for the pleasure of merely being there as well as self-education, this personal selection from his many sketchbooks is accompanied by transcriptions of notes and observations, along with introductory remarks for the different regions included: Paris, Haute Loire, Provence, Haute Provence, Normandy, Aquitaine, and Entre des Meures.
Iberia by James A Michener – SPAIN
Spain is an immemorial land like no other, one that James A. Michener, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and celebrated citizen of the world, came to love as his own. Iberia is Michener’s enduring nonfiction tribute to his cherished second home. In the fresh and vivid prose that is his trademark, he not only reveals the celebrated history of bullfighters and warrior kings, painters and processions, cathedrals and olive orchards, he also shares the intimate, often hidden country he came to know, where the congeniality of living souls is thrust against the dark weight of history. Wild, contradictory, passionately beautiful, this is Spain as experienced by a master writer.
The Emperor Far Away by David Elmer – CHINA
Far from the glittering cities of Beijing and Shanghai, China’s borderlands are populated by around one hundred million people who are not Han Chinese. For many of these restive minorities, the old Chinese adage ‘the mountains are high and the Emperor far away’, meaning Beijing’s grip on power is tenuous and its influence unwelcome, continues to resonate. Travelling through China’s most distant and unknown reaches, David Eimer explores the increasingly tense relationship between the Han Chinese and the ethnic minorities. Deconstructing the myths represented by Beijing, Eimer reveals a shocking and fascinating picture of a China that is more of an empire than a country.
The Minaret of Djam by Freya Stark – AFGHANISTAN
The 12th century minaret of Djam is one of Afghanistan’s most celebrated treasures, a magnificent symbol of the powerful Ghorid Empire that once stretched from Iran to India. The second tallest brick minaret in the world, Djam lies in the heart of central Afghanistan’s wild Ghor Province. Surrounded by 2,000 metre-high mountains and by the remains of what many believe to have been the lost city of Turquoise Mountain – one of the greatest cities of the Middle Ages – Djam is, even today, one of the most inaccessible and remote places in Afghanistan. When Freya Stark travelled there, few people in the world had ever laid eyes on it or managed to reach the desolate valley in which it lies. Her journey from Kabul to Kandahar and Herat was difficult and often dangerous but her account shines with humour and is adorned with beautiful descriptions of the land she journeyed through and the people she encountered. A celebrated portrait of Afghanistan and its history, ‘The Minaret of Djam’ is a poignant reminder that this was once far more than just a country ravaged by war and the political games of the world’s superpowers.
The Appian Way by David Hewson – ITALY
They say all roads lead to Rome – but some are more important than others.
Along 350 miles from Rome to Brindisi, the Appian Way rose from its humble beginnings as a military track to become the engine that transformed Ancient Rome into the greatest empire Europe had ever seen.
Two thousand years later, with the continent in the process of another seismic shift, bestselling author David Hewson travels its route in the footsteps of the ordinary and extraordinary people who trod its path. From the gladiator rebel Spartacus to the marauding general Hannibal, via emperors, martyrs and politicians, he uncovers the stories of war, intrigue and ambition buried beneath its cobblestones.
Whether you love history, travel, Italy or all three, The Appian Way is a vivid, personal and fascinating exploration of an ancient journey that has never been more relevant.
Overland by Yasmin Cordery Khan – EUROPE, CENTRAL ASIA, INDIA, PAKISTAN
It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime: the open road, London to Kathmandu, just three young people looking for adventure. No one could have predicted the way it ended, and for fifty years the truth has been buried. But now, Joyce is ready to tell her story.
London, 1970. Fresh out of a dead-end job, Joyce answers an ad in the local paper: Kathmandu by van, leave August. Share petrol and costs. Joyce is desperate to escape life in suburbia, and aristocrat Freddie looks like he can show her a wild time.
Together with Anton, Freddie’s best friend from boarding school, they embark on the overland trail from London to Kathmandu in a beaten-up old Land Rover. But as they cross the borders into Asia, Freddie can’t outrun his family’s history, leading to devastating consequences for everyone.
Overland is a novel about youth, privilege, class and the sharp echoes of British imperialism from one of the most exciting new voices in literary fiction.
The Friendship Highway: Two Journeys in Tibet by Charlie Carroll – TIBET
Tibet was not just on the horizon, it capped it. Four thousand metres above this city was a country of stone and ice, and, even though it was officially closed, there was still a way in. A compelling and unforgettable encounter on the roof of the world… Hoping to reach Tibet after a twenty-year obsession, Charlie Carroll travelled to China. Contending with Chinese bureaucracy, unforgiving terrain and sickness-inducing altitude, Charlie experienced twenty-first-century Tibet in all its heartbreaking beauty. Tibetan-born Lobsang fled the volatile region over the Himalayas, on foot, as a child in 1989. An exile in Nepal, then a student in India, he was called back to Tibet by love. At the end of the road known as the Friendship Highway, he met Charlie and recounted his extraordinary life story, exemplifying the hardship, resilience and hope of modern Tibetan life.
We hope you enjoy our selection. If we’ve missed and of your favourites, please let us know in Comments below. There are almost 800 on the TripFiction site – so it was quite a job to whittle them down. Click here to see the full listing.
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