Long before cheap flights and map apps, travel writing offered vicarious passage to distant places, and that impulse remains powerful. A good travel book collapses distance and time, letting us inhabit landscapes, cultures, and states of mind we may never physically reach. Even today, when information is abundant, good, thoughtful travel writing offers something rarer: meaning shaped by experience, not just facts.
One obvious pleasure is vicarious escape. Travel books allow readers to taste risk, beauty, and disorientation from the safety of a chair. We can cross deserts, board trains, or wander foreign streets without jet lag, expense, or fear. Closely related is inspiration. Many readers turn to travel writing to imagine future journeys, gathering emotional rather than logistical preparation: what a place feels like, how it changes those who pass through it.
But travel books endure because they do more than describe places. At their best, they're about the self under pressure. Travel strips away routines and exposes temperament, prejudice, curiosity, boredom, and desire. The unfamiliar becomes a mirror. As a result, great travel writing often doubles as memoir, philosophy, or cultural criticism. It helps us understand not only where we might go, but who we are when removed from the familiar.
Travel writing also satisfies an intellectual and even you might say moral curiosity. It allows readers to test assumptions about other cultures, power, colonialism, faith, and modernity. The strongest works resist postcard exoticism and instead grapple with ambiguity, discomfort, and contradiction. Finally, there is the sheer pleasure of voice. Like novels, the best travel books are remembered not for itineraries but for sentences — for the company of a mind worth traveling with. That combination of escape, insight, and literary craft explains why a small number of travel books continue to be read decades after their journeys ended.
Here are what I consider to be a half dozen of the finest travel books in English, spanning eras and styles from the mid-20th century to the early 21st, each meriting inclusion not merely for where they go, but for what they reveal. Looking at it, I now realize that most of them happen to be British writers, but hey, it is what it is. Anyway, I´m sure you´ll have others, so please let me know in the comments!
Arabian Sands — Wilfred Thesiger (1959)
A British explorer and writer known for his austere, immersive journeys, including this one, he documents here crossing the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia in the 1940s alongside Bedouin companions. Severe, disciplined, and deeply respectful, the book stands as a record of a way of life on the verge of disappearance. Its stature rests on its moral seriousness and its vision of travel as endurance rather than pleasure. Not exactly how most of us approach travel these days, to say the least, but there´s a lot of very worthwhile insight here.
In Patagonia — Bruce Chatwin (1977)
A British writer who reshaped travel literature through fragmentation and myth, here Chatwin dumps linear narrative in favor of anecdotes, legends, and obsessions he encounters in southern South America. Patagonia becomes a literary landscape rather than a destination. I include it here because I think it redefined what travel writing could be — subjective, restless, and formally inventive.
The Great Railway Bazaar — Paul Theroux (1975)
Theroux is (finally!) a U.S. novelist and travel writer - probably the most prominent one still living - known for his sharp observational voice, and his classic follows an epic train journey from Europe through Asia. Refreshingly (at least for a half century ago), here he writes as much about boredom, irritation, and intimacy as wonder, insisting on honesty over romance, and the book remains foundational for modern travel writing’s unapologetically personal tone.
A Time of Gifts — Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
A British scholar, soldier, and one of the greatest prose stylists of 20th-century travel writing, Fermor recounts his youthful walk across Europe, in 1933-34, from the Netherlands to Turkey. It combines memory, erudition, and lyricism to capture a continent on the brink of disappearance, and stands out for its unmatched prose and historical poignancy, transforming travel into an act of cultural preservation.
Travels with Herodotus — Ryszard Kapuściński (2004)
The sometimes controversial Polish journalist, foreign correspondent, and Nobel-prize nominee known for blending reportage with philosophy, this work - which is an exception on this list because this isn´t written in English but rather is a translation from the Polish - pairs his early assignments in Asia and Africa with reflections on the ancient historian (I fear I may be too lazy to read Herodutus myself, so I take his word for it). This ambitious book elevates travel writing into an examination of power, storytelling, and cultural misunderstanding. (I´ve also enjoyed other non-memoir books of Kapuściński´s, such as The Emperor and The Soccer War.)
West with the Night — Beryl Markham (1942)
Yet another Brit, Markham was a pioneering aviatrix and writer who grew up in colonial East Africa, and here she recounts flying, exploration, and solitude in Kenya with remarkable clarity and restraint. Less a travelogue than a meditation on freedom and landscape, it´s widely regarded as the finest travel memoir by a woman, especially notable for her authoritative voice and luminous prose.
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