Travel book series in reading order

by Kathryn Lasky

by Walter R. Brooks

by Avi

by Jenna Evans Welch

by Janet Evanovich

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.

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.

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).

Simon Winchester

36 books

Simon Winchester is a British-American author and journalist whose 36 catalogued books are largely narrative nonfiction: history, travel writing and biography. Winchester reported for The Guardian, covering Bloody Sunday and the Watergate scandal, and has contributed to magazines including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian and National Geographic. The catalogue runs from In Holy Terror (1975) through Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire (1985) and Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles (1988) to The Breath of the Gods (2025). One novel sits among the nonfiction.

Farley Mowat

38 books• 1 series

Farley Mowat (1921-2014) was a Canadian writer and environmentalist whose work was translated into 52 languages and sold more than 17 million copies. People of the Deer (1950) opens a catalogue of 38 titles and begins Mowat's writing on the Canadian north, its Inuit peoples and the Arctic. Never Cry Wolf (1963), an account of life among Arctic wolves, was filmed in 1983. Mowat wrote for children as well, taking the Vicky Metcalf Award in 1970, and the catalogue closes at Eastern Passage (2010).

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).

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.

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.

Gerald Durrell

40 books• 3 series

Gerald Durrell was a British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist and television presenter who wrote about collecting and keeping animals. Durrell's first animal-collecting trip to the British Cameroons was funded by an inheritance, and his wife Jacquie pressed him to write an account of it. The catalogue opens with The Overloaded Ark (1953) and holds 40 books to 1993, across autobiographical volumes, the Corfu Trilogy and the Puppy Tales for children. My Family and Other Animals (1956) and A Zoo in My Luggage (1962) are among them. Zoology, natural history, animal behaviour and travel are the recurring subjects.

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.

Frances Mayes is an American writer, born in 1940, known above all for Under the Tuscan Sun, the 1996 memoir that held a place on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years and became a film. The catalogue runs to 27 books, beginning with poetry in Peach and Glass (1977) and moving through travel writing about Italy to A Great Marriage (2024). Description and travel, Italian social life, women travellers and biography fill out the subjects.

Lawrence Durrell

45 books• 4 series

Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist and travel writer, born in India, schooled in England from the age of 11, and resident in Corfu from 1935 and in many countries after that. The Alexandria Quartet, published between 1957 and 1960, is his best known work; the Avignon Quintet, the Revolt of Aphrodite and the comic Antrobus stories follow. Durrell's travel books include Prospero's Cell (1945) and Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957). He was the elder brother of the naturalist Gerald Durrell.

James A. Michener

50 books• 1 series

James A. Michener (February 3, 1907 – October 16, 1997) was an American writer of more than 40 books, most of them long family sagas tracing many generations in a single geographic setting, with detailed history woven in. Tales of the South Pacific and Return to Paradise, both from 1947, are the earliest listed titles, followed by The Fires of Spring (1949), Sayonara (1953), The Bridges at Toko-ri (1953) and Hawaii (1959). Many of Michener's books were bestsellers and Book of the Month Club picks, and the research behind them was noted for its thoroughness. Travel, civilization and the Korean War feature in the subjects.

Graham Greene

80 books• 3 series

Graham Greene (Henry Graham Greene, 2 October 1904 to 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and journalist. Greene gained an early reputation for two kinds of book: serious Catholic novels and thrillers, which Greene called entertainments. Across 67 years of writing, including more than 25 novels, the work examined the conflicting moral and political questions of the modern world. The catalogue begins with Babbling April (1925), then The Man Within (1929), Stamboul Train (1932), It's a Battlefield (1934) and A Gun for Sale (1936). Greene was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Subjects include travel, drama, England and Catholics.

Wallace Stegner (Wallace Earle Stegner, February 18, 1909 to April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, historian and environmentalist, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". Stegner received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977. The catalogue records 41 books from Remembering Laughter (1937) to The Twilight of Self Reliance (2008). Mormon Country (1942), The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943) and Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954) are listed titles. Subjects include the American West, Mormons, history and biography.

Guardians of Ga'Hoole is one of the series by Kathryn Lasky, an American children's writer born June 24, 1944, who writes for adults as Kathryn Lasky Knight and E. L. Swann. Lasky's children's work also includes Dear America and The Royal Diaries books, Wolves of the Beyond, Sugaring Time and The Night Journey, and honours include a Newbery Honor, the National Jewish Book Award and the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature. The catalogue holds 159 books from I Have Four Names for My Grandfather (1976) to Sacred Light (2026), including Tugboats Never Sleep (1977), The Weaver's Gift (1980) and Beyond the Divide (1983). Horses Of The Dawn, Bears Of The Ice and Camp Princess are further series, and subjects name owls, wolves, diaries and Jews.

Doc Ford, a marine biologist in Florida, anchors most of Randy Wayne White's fiction. White's 62 catalogued books also hold the Hannah Smith novels, the Sharks Incorporated books, the Dusky MacMorgan thrillers written as Randy Striker and the Hawker series written as Carl Ramm. The list begins in 1981 with Key West Connection and reaches Tomlinson's Wake in 2025.

Gary Paulsen

181 books• 17 series

Survival and outdoor adventure run through Gary Paulsen's writing for young readers. The catalogue holds 181 books, from Some Birds Don't Fly (1968) to Northwind (2022), at a median length of 105 pages. Brian Robeson, Francis Tucket, Duncan Culpepper, Murphy and the World of Adventure books head the series lines, with non-fiction and picture books alongside. No new Paulsen title has appeared since 2022.

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.

Dave Eggers

60 books• 10 series

Dave Eggers, born March 12, 1970, is an American writer, editor and publisher of fiction, non-fiction and children's books. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a 2000 memoir, became a bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for General Nonfiction. Eggers founded Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the 826 Valencia literacy project, Voice of Witness and ScholarMatch. The catalogue lists 61 books, including What Is the What (2006) and Contrapposto (2026), with The Minister of Color and Light due in 2027.

Provence made Peter Mayle's name, in travel writing about French village life, food and neighbours. The earlier work is very different: illustrated guides for children and parents, starting with 'What's Happening to Me?' (1975) and 'Where Did I Come From?' (1977), plus the Wicked Willie cartoons. Sam Levitt heads a later crime series. Fifty-four titles make up the catalogue, which closes with My Twenty-Five Years in Provence in 2018.

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.

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.

Rebecca Solnit

30 books• 1 series

Rebecca Solnit is an American writer and activist, born in 1961, whose subjects include feminism, the environment, politics, place and art. River of Shadows won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. A Paradise Built in Hell (2009, revised 2020) examines how communities help one another after disasters, The Faraway Nearby (2013) is a memoir, and Men Explain Things to Me (2014) collects essays on feminism and women's writing. The catalogue lists 30 titles, beginning with Secret Exhibition (1991) and including Savage Dreams (1994), Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005). The Beginning Comes After the End (2026) is the newest.