Journeys book series in reading order

by Jan Morris

Paul Theroux

68 books• 1 series

Travel writing and fiction have occupied Paul Theroux since 1968. Born in 1941, the American writer is catalogued here with 68 books, from Fong and the Indians (1968) to True North: On the Road in Canada (2026). The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) is his best known travelogue. The Mosquito Coast took the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981, was filmed in 1986 and became a television series in 2021. Railways, voyages and description of place recur throughout the catalogue, which is ongoing.

V.S. Naipaul

36 books• 2 series

V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018) was a Trinidad-born British writer of fiction and nonfiction. The early novels are comic and set in Trinidad, among them The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) and Miguel Street (1959), and A House for Mr Biswas (1961) was the breakthrough. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State. Travel and reportage form a second strand, including The Middle Passage (1962), An Area of Darkness (1964) and the India Trilogy. The catalogue holds 36 books across six decades, at a median of 248 pages.

Bruce Chatwin

13 books• 1 series

Charles Bruce Chatwin, born in Sheffield on 13 May 1940 and dead on 18 January 1989, was an English travel writer, novelist and journalist. In Patagonia (1977) made the name as a travel writer, though Chatwin preferred the description of storyteller, drawn to unusual tales. On the Black Hill (1982) took the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Utz (1988) reached the Booker Prize shortlist. In 2008 The Times placed Chatwin 46th among the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. The catalogue lists 13 books dated 1977 to 2010, with travel, journeys and Patagonia among the recorded subjects.

Bill Bryson

28 books• 9 series

Bill Bryson (William McGuire Bryson, born 8 December 1951) is an American journalist and author who became a British citizen in 2014. Bryson writes nonfiction about travel, the English language and science. The site lists 28 books from Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984) through A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 (2025). Notes from a Small Island (1995) explores Britain, and A Walk in the Woods (1997) and The Mother Tongue (1990) are also listed. Bryson served as chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011.

John Steinbeck

44 books• 1 series

John Steinbeck's catalogue holds 44 titles, from Cup of Gold (1929) through to Steinbeck in Vietnam in 2012. Social conditions and American life supply the subject matter, with travel writing and the Cannery Row grouping among the named sets. Early entries include The Pastures of Heaven (1932), The Red Pony (1933), Tortilla Flat (1935) and In Dubious Battle (1936). The catalogue is listed as complete.

Henry James

131 books• 1 series

Henry James was an American-British author, placed between literary realism and literary modernism. Americans abroad, social life and manners, and the friction between Europe and the United States are the standing subjects of the fiction, and James's correspondence and travel writing are catalogued alongside it. The catalogue lists 131 titles with publication dates from 1866 to 2016, opening with Selected Tales and The Novels of George Eliot, both 1866. The 1870s were the heaviest decade, holding A Passionate Pilgrim, At Isella and Watch and Ward, all published in 1871.

Evelyn Waugh

47 books• 2 series

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) was an English novelist, biographer and travel writer who also worked as a journalist and book reviewer. The satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934) came early; Brideshead Revisited followed in 1945, and the Sword of Honour trilogy between 1952 and 1961. Waugh's catalogue holds 47 titles across fiction, travel and biography, with editions dated as late as 2005. Waugh was educated at Lancing College and at Hertford College, Oxford, and taught school briefly before writing full time.

Peter Matthiessen

41 books• 3 series

Peter Matthiessen is the only writer to win the National Book Award in both nonfiction, for The Snow Leopard in 1979, and fiction, for Shadow Country in 2008. Matthiessen, an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, Zen teacher and one-time CIA agent, was born May 22, 1927, died April 5, 2014, and co-founded The Paris Review. Nonfiction covered nature, travel and American Indian history, including In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) on the Leonard Peltier case, and Matthiessen was also a prominent environmental activist. The catalogue lists 41 books from The Year of the Tempest (1957) to In Paradise (2014), including Wildlife in America (1959), The Cloud Forest (1961) and At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965).

Jan Morris

64 books• 5 series

Jan Morris (2 October 1926 to 20 November 2020) was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer, born James Humphry Morris. Morris published under the birth name until 1972, the year of gender reassignment surgery. Morris wrote the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968 to 1978), a history of the British Empire, and portraits of cities including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. Morris was a member of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, which made the first confirmed ascent. The catalogue lists 64 books from Sultan in Oman (1957) and Coronation Everest (1958) to Allegorizings (2021), with Hav also among the series.

Anthony Trollope

81 books• 6 series

Anthony Trollope was an English novelist of the Victorian era who also served as a civil servant. The catalogue holds 81 Trollope titles, opening with The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and closing at Malachi's Cove and Other Stories and Essays (1985). Trollope grouped much of the fiction into the Chronicles of Barsetshire and the Palliser novels, and wrote travel books, essays and short stories alongside them. English social life and customs, inheritance and succession, and manners recur across the subjects.

John Angus McPhee, born on 8 March 1931, is an American writer regarded as a pioneer of creative nonfiction. McPhee was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Nonfiction four times and won in 1999 for Annals of the Former World, a collection of five books. The George Polk Career Award followed in 2008, and McPhee has held the Ferris Professorship of Journalism at Princeton University since 1974. The catalogue lists 45 McPhee books, from A Sense of Where You Are (1965) to They're in the River (2025), including Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1967) and Encounters with the Archdruid (1971). Subjects include geology, essays and travel.

D.H. Lawrence

146 books• 3 series

David Herbert Lawrence, 11 September 1885 to 2 March 1930, was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, travel writer, literary critic and painter. Lawrence's modernist writing examines modernity, social alienation and industrialisation while arguing for sexuality, vitality and instinct. Four novels went through censorship trials over their treatment of sex and their explicit language: The Rainbow (1915), Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The catalogue lists 146 entries, among them The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912) and the story collection The Prussian Officer (1914), and groups some of them under Sons and Lovers and the Brangwen Family.

Michael Palin

46 books• 5 series

Michael Palin is an English actor, comedian, writer and television presenter, born on 5 May 1943, and a member of the Monty Python comedy group. Palin appeared in Monty Python's Flying Circus from 1969 to 1974, after early television work that included The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set. Honours include the BAFTA Fellowship in 2013 and a knighthood in 2019. The catalogue lists 46 books from 1976 to 2026, among them the Palin's Travels and Palin Diaries series, with In Nigeria (2026) the newest title. Early entries include Bert Fegg's Nasty Book For Boys And Girls (1976) and Ripping Yarns (1978).

Tim Severin (1940-2020) was a British explorer and historian who retraced the voyages of legendary travellers and wrote about them. The Sindbad Voyage (1982) won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and Severin received medals from both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. His 27 books begin with Tracking Marco Polo (1964). Later fiction includes the Viking novels and the Hector Lynch pirate series.

Pico Iyer

22 books

Travel writing is the main work of Pico Iyer, an English-born essayist and novelist born on 11 February 1957. Iyer's books on crossing cultures include Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), The Lady and the Monk (1991) and The Global Soul (2000). Japan and Buddhism are recurring subjects. Iyer has written for Time, Harper's, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. His 22 books reach Aflame: Learning from Silence (2025).

Ranulph Fiennes

33 books

Ranulph Fiennes writes out of a life of expeditions. Born in 1944, Fiennes served eight years in the British Army, including counter-insurgency work attached to the Army of the Sultanate of Oman, then became the first person to reach both Poles by surface travel and the first to cross Antarctica on foot, and stood on the summit of Everest in 2009 at the age of 65. The catalogue lists 33 books dated 1970 to 2023, at a median of 329 pages, from A Talent For Trouble through To the Ends of the Earth (1983) and Atlantis of the Sands (1992) to Lawrence of Arabia (2023). Travel, exploration and biography are the standing subjects.