Travel memoirs

Before you head off on summer holiday this year, check out our travel memoir booklist. You might even find something set in the countery you're visiting that may even point the way to adventure and new experiences. This list is far from definitive, but will hopefully whet your appetite for far-off lands and distant locations.

The Honey Gatherers / Maximum City / Surinam / The Motorcycle Diaries / Burma Chronicles / Six Months in Sudan / On the Road / Mani – Travels in the Southern Peloponnese / In Patagonia / A Moveable Feast / Shadow of the Silk Road / Round Ireland with a Fridge / Assasinating Shakespeare / Eat Pray Love

> The Honey Gatherers by Mimlu Sen (Rider)

Mimlu Sen is living a bohemian life in Paris when she witnesses an electrifying performance by three wandering minstrels from rural India. They wear flowing, multicoloured robes and play frenetic rhythms on strange instruments made of wood and clay, capturing the many moods of nature and passion. After her turbulent past, including a year in a Calcutta jail, Mimlu instantly knows it is time to set off on the journey of her life.

One of the minstrels, Paban Das Baul, is a gifted young musician with a growing international reputation. Mimlu defies prejudice to travel with him deep into the heart of Bengal, the rural hinterland behind Calcutta where few tourists ever go. In this fascinating and unusual book, she describes how they make their way across country, from shanty town to village, from monastery to festival, perched on the roofs of buses and squeezed inside trains, encountering tantrics and sages, exorcisms and witch sightings, catfish that climb trees and esoteric secrets - and fall in love.

With Paban's encouragement, Mimlu too performs for alms - 'gathering honey' in the traditional Baul way - and is initiated into a hidden world of song, sensuality and adventure as wild and unpredictable as the landscape itself.

Back to the top

> Maximum City by Suketu Mehta (Headline)

Bombay's story is told through the lives, often desperately near the edge, of some of the people who live there. Hitmen, dancing girls, cops, movie stars, poets, beggars and politicians - Suketu looked at the city through their eyes.

The complex texture of these extraordinary tales is threaded together by Suketu Mehta's own history of growing up in Bombay and returning to live there after a 21-year absence, and in looking through the eyes of his found the city within himself.

Part-memoir, part-journalism, part-travelogue, and written with the relentless observation and patience of a novelist, Maximum City is a brilliantly illuminating portrait of Bombay and its people – a book as vast, diverse, and rich in experience, incident, and sensation as the city itself.

Click here to read Booktrust's review of Maximum City

Back to the top

> Surinam by Andrew Westoll (Old Street Publishing)

Perched above Brazil on the shoulder of South America, Surinam is a land of myth and magic. Once traded to the Dutch by the English in return for Manhattan, it is now home to the largest tract of pristine rainforest left on earth. Andrew Westoll first fell under Surinam's spell as a young biologist, studying monkeys deep inside its primordial jungles. Five years later he returned, determined to chart the human, historical and environmental legacies of this surprising, little-known land. What he found was a country poised on the brink of profound change- a nation facing either ecological catastrophe or salvation.

Westoll explores Surinam's bloody past, the allure of its wild places, the legends and rituals of its extraordinary people. An honest and beautiful writer he conjures a place of golden light and impenetrable shadow, of long-held secrets and sacred stories. And in the end he uncovers a nation that- like Westoll himself- is still in search of its own destiny.

Back to the top

> The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara / translated by Alexandra Keeble (HarperPerennial)

In January 1952, two young men from Buenos Aires set out to explore South America on 'La Poderosa', the Powerful One: a 500cc Norton motorcycle. One of them was the twenty-three-year-old Che Guevara.

Written eight years before the Cuban Revolution, these are Che's diaries - full of disasters and discoveries, high drama, low comedy and laddish improvisations. During his travels through Argentina, Chile, Peru and Venezuela, Che's main concerns are where the next drink is coming from, where the next bed is to be found and who might be around to share it. Che becomes a stowaway, a fireman and a football coach; he sometimes falls in love and frequently falls off the motorbike.

Within a decade the whole world would know his name. His trip might have been an adventure of a lifetime - had his lifetime not turned into a much greater adventure.

Back to the top

> Burma Chronicles bu Guy Delisle (Jonathan Cape)

After developing his acclaimed style of firsthand reporting with his bestselling graphic novels Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Shenzen: A Travelogue from China, Guy Delisle is back with Burma Chronicles. In this country notorious for its use of concealment and isolation as social control - where scissors-wielding censors monitor the papers, the de facto leader of the opposition has been under decade-long house arrest, insurgent-controlled regions are effectively cut off from the world, and rumour is the most reliable source of current information - he turns his gaze to the everyday for a sense of the bigger picture.

Delisle's deft and recognisable renderings take note of almsgiving rituals, daylong power-cuts and rampant heroin use in outlying regions, in this place where catastrophic mismanagement and ironhanded rule come up against profound resilience of spirit, expatriate life ambles along, and non-governmental organisations struggle with the risk of co-option by the military junta.

Burma Chronicles is drawn with a minimal line, and interspersed with wordless vignettes and moments of Delisle's distinctive slapstick humour.

Click here to read Booktrust's review of Burma Chronicles

Back to the top

> Six Months in Sudan by James Maskalyk (Canongate)

James Maskalyk set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan in 2007 as Medecins Sans Frontieres' newest medical doctor in the field. Equipped with his experience as an emergency physician in a Western hospital and his desire to understand the hardest parts of the world, Maskalyk's days were spent treating malnourished children, fending off a measles epidemic and staying out of the soldiers' way.

Worn raw in the struggle to meet overwhelming needs with inadequate resources, he returned home six months later more affected by the experience, the people and the place than he had anticipated. Six Months in Sudan began as a blog that he wrote from his hut in Sudan in an attempt to bring his family and friends closer to his hot, hot days. It is a story about humans: the people of Abyei who suffer its hardship because it is their home, and the doctors, nurses and countless volunteers who leave their homes with the tools to make another's easier to endure. With great hope and insight, Maskalyk illuminates a distant place - its heat, its people, its poverty, its war - to inspire possibilities for action.

Back to the top

> On the Road by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Classics)

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognised as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

Back to the top

> Mani – Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh Fermor (John Murray)

This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe.

Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa...

Leigh Fermor's hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic - together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.

Back to the top

> In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (Vintage Classics)

Beautifully written and full of wonderful descriptions and intriguing tales, In Patagonia is an account of Bruce Chatwin's travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and his encounters with the people whose fascinating stories delay him on the road. Fascinated by Patagonia ever since an early childhood lust for his Grandma's scrap of hairy Giant Sloth skin, Bruce Chatwin is intrigued by odd miners, Darwin, the Welsh and the log cabin built by Butch Cassidy. From Rio Negro to the southernmost town of Ushuaia, Chatwin depicts all in writing as spare as the Patagonian desert and as vibrant as the purple clouds off Last Hope Sound.

Back to the top

> A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (Vintage Classics)

'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.'

Hemingway's memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the 1920s are deeply personal, warmly affectionate and full of wit. Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him - literary 'stars' like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein - he recalls the time when, poor, happy and writing in cafes, he discovered his vocation.

Back to the top

> Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron (Vintage)

On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. Covering over 7000 miles in eight months Thurbron recounts extraordinary adventures - a near-miss with a drunk-driver, incarceration in a Chinese cell during the SARS epidemic, undergoing root canal treatment without anaesthetic in Iran - in inimitable prose. Shadow of the Silk Road is about Asia today; a magnificent account of an ancient world in modern ferment.

Back to the top

> Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks (Ebury Press)

'I hereby bet Tony Hawks the sum of One Hundred Pounds that he cannot hitchhike round the circumference of Ireland, with a fridge, within one calendar month'. A foolhardy attempt to win a drunken bet led to Tony Hawks having one of the most unforgettable experiences of his life. Joined by his trusty travelling-companion-cum-domestic-appliance, he found himself in the midst of a remarkable, inspirational and, at times, downright silly adventure. In their month of madness, Tony and his fridge surfed together; entered a batchelor festival; and one of them had sex without the other knowing. The fridge got christened, and they even met the poorest king on Earth. An absurd story of an extraordinary adventure, Round Ireland with a Fridge follows the fearless pair as they battle towards Dublin and a breathtaking finale that is moving, uplifting, and a fitting conclusion to the whole ridiculous affair.

Back to the top

> Assassinating Shakespeare by Thomas Goltz (Saqi Books)

In 1976, Thomas Goltz, then a naive twenty-one-year-old on the trail of his errant brother, worked his way around Africa putting on one-man Shakespeare performances. This impulsive trip saw him wandering through the cities and villages of East, Central and Southern Africa. His first port-of-call, after hitchhiking through Eastern Europe and the Middle East, was war-torn Ethiopia. Close encounters followed, with bandits, missionaries, guerrillas, prostitutes, savvy street kids, unrequited loves and, of course, ordinary, Shakespeare-loving Africans.

Back to the top

> Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Bloomsbury)

It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby - and she doesn't want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her.

Back to the top