Travel book series in reading order

by Jan Morris

by Hairy Bikers

by Kathryn Lasky

by Isobelle Carmody

by Walter R. Brooks

by Avi

by Loree Lough

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.

Canadian travel writer and novelist Will Ferguson, born October 12, 1964, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel 419 (2012). Ferguson's 21 catalogued books begin in 1998 with humorous travel writing such as Hokkaido Highway Blues and The Hitchhiker's Guide to Japan. His Canadian humour includes Why I Hate Canadians (1999) and Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw (2004). Ferguson also writes the Miranda Abbott Mystery series, and Killer on the First Page (2025) is the newest title.

Jonathan Raban

18 books

Jonathan Raban was a British travel writer, novelist, playwright and critic, born on 14 June 1942 and died on 17 January 2023. The catalogue lists 18 books between 1968 and 2023, starting with two 1968 titles: Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn and Technique of Modern Fiction. Soft City appeared in 1974 and Arabia in 1979. Subjects include travel in the United States and immigrants, and titles include Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi (1981) and Coasting: A Private Voyage (1986). Father and Son (2023) is the last book listed.

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.