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Best Picks for  Summertime Travel Novels

It's summer “ and the reading should be easy,” so I came up with a short list of a few travel novels that I personally found especially rich and exciting.

Very often a travel novel is a far better read than a guide book. It creates a vividness and depth of a town or village or city more memorably.

And so, with temps hovering in the 90’s, here are my summer picks for a lazy read. You certainly have your own.

In Travels with a Tangerine, Tim Mackintosh-Smith  s

When I was an aspiring writer and novice traveller, reading Dervla Murphy's travel classics such as In Ethiopia with a Mule, I never thought that one day this doyenne of travel writing would be reviewing my work. But that's exactly what happened this month, with a review of my new edition of the Bradt Guide to Palestine appearing in Wanderlust, a major British travel glossy. So many thanks to Dervla for the glowing review, and to Wanderlust for publishing a substantial review of a destination wh

Three Great Non-Travel, Travel Books

Often a non-travel novel creates the vividness and depth of a town or village or city better than  travel book might.

But recommending a book is always tricky, so here are three recent reads and likes:

In Travels with a Tangerine, Tim Mackintosh-Smith  sets out to follow the footsteps of the great Arab/Muslim traveler, Ibn Battuta  who left his native Tangier in 1325, covered three times the distance of Marco Polo, and returned 30 years later…after some 75,000

 Old Parish Church Cemetery in Whitby, England

My obsession to travel to every site related to either the fictional Count Dracula or his real historical counterpart, Prince Vlad Dracula the Impaler, grew out of a visit to Whitby, England, where part of the novel Dracula takes place.  I stood on the cemetery hill (top) where, in Bram Stoker's Dracula Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray spent hour after hour sitting on their "favourite seat" (a bench placed over a suicide's grave near the edge of the c