Best Travel Books to Read When You Are Stuck at Home

City girl Torre DeRoche isn't looking for love, but a chance encounter in a San Francisco bar sparks an instant connection with a soulful Argentinean man who sweeps her off her feet. The problem? He's just about to cast the dock lines and voyage around the world on his small sailboat, and Torre is terrified of deep water.

Torre determines that to keep the man of her dreams, she must embark on the voyage of her nightmares, so she waves good-bye to dry land and braces for a life-changing journey that's as exhilarating as it is terrifying.

James Gordon Bennett, the eccentric and stupendously wealthy owner of The New York Herald, had recently captured the world's attention by dispatching Stanley to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone. Now he is keen to re-create that sensation on an even more epic scale.

He funds an official U.S. naval expedition to reach the Pole, choosing as its captain a young officer named George Washington De Long. De Long gained fame for a rescue operation off the coast of Greenland. He led a team of 32 men deep into uncharted Arctic waters, carrying the aspirations of a young country burning to become a world power.

On July 8, 1879, the USS Jeannette set sail from San Francisco to cheering crowds in the grip of "Arctic Fever." With twists and turns worthy of a thriller, In The Kingdom of Ice is a spellbinding tale of heroism and determination in the most unforgiving territory on Earth.

In Japanese-occupied Shanghai, two people from different parts of the world come together due to fate and a mutual love for music. Aiyi is an heiress and the owner of a glamorous Shanghai nightclub and Ernest is a Jewish refugee from Germany. They both deal with unspeakable loss as the war escalates, and still manage to come together through love and a desire for survival.

The book transports you to Shanghai and gives a sense of what life would have been like during those hellish years. A fascinating look at life during World War 2.

I picked up this book because my brother-in-law is from Sarajevo and fought in the Bosnian War in the early 1990s. The book tells of a city under siege and the lives of four people as they experience the conflict.

From his window, a musician sees twenty-two of his friends and neighbors waiting in a breadline. Then, in a flash, they are killed by a mortar attack. In an act of defiance, the man picks up his cello and decides to play at the site of the shelling for twenty-two days, honoring their memory.

Elsewhere, a young man leaves home to collect drinking water for his family and, in the face of danger, must weigh generosity against selfish survivalism.

A third man sets off in search of bread and instead runs into a long-ago friend who reminds him of the city he thought he had lost, and the man he once was.

As both men are drawn into the orbit of cello music, a fourth character—a young woman, a sniper—holds the fate of the cellist in her hands. As she protects him with her life, her own army prepares to challenge the kind of person she has become.

A novel of great intensity and power, and inspired by a true story, The Cellist of Sarajevo poignantly explores how war can change one’s definition of humanity, the effect of music on our emotional endurance, and how a romance with the rituals of daily life can itself be a form of resistance.

When a Chinese monk broke into a hidden cave in 1900, he uncovered one of the world's great literary secrets: a time capsule from the ancient Silk Road. Inside, scrolls were piled from floor to ceiling, undisturbed for a thousand years.

The gem within was the Diamond Sutra of AD 868. This key Buddhist teaching, made 500 years before Gutenberg inked his press, is the world's oldest printed book. Central to the Silk Road's rediscovery was a man named Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born scholar and archaeologist employed by the British service. Undaunted by the vast Gobi Desert, Stein crossed thousands of desolate miles with his fox terrier Dash.

Stein met the Chinese monk and secured the Diamond Sutra and much more. The scroll's journey merges an explorer's adventures, political intrigue, and continued controversy. As the Gutenberg Age cedes to the Google Age, the survival of the Silk Road's greatest treasure is testament to the endurance of the written word.

The year is 1945. Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles.

Suddenly she becomes a Sassenach—an “outlander”—in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of Our Lord . . . 1743. The descriptive imagery of the Scottish highlands and intriguing characters will not leave readers disappointed.

This is a beautifuly story that takes you through the history and tales of Ireland. One evening in 1951, a storyteller arrives at a house in the Irish countryside. In exchange for a bed for the night, he tells the family the formative stories of Ireland's history. Ronan, a nine-year-old boy, is so enamored by the man's storytelling that he devotes his life trying to find the man.

Ronan's search for the Storyteller becomes both a journey of self-discovery, family secrets, and at times conflicting histories of his native land. One of my favorite books of all time.

Many people have already read this novel, but in case you haven't, here is a brief synopsis. This is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. 

The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories can, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams.

Despite the fact that Australia harbors more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else, including sharks, crocodiles, snakes, even riptides and deserts, Bill Bryson adores the place, and he takes his readers on a rollicking ride far beyond that beaten tourist path.

Wherever he goes he finds Australians who are cheerful, extroverted, and unfailingly obliging, and these beaming products of land with clean, safe cities, cold beer, and constant sunshine fill the pages of this wonderful book. Australia is an immense and fortunate land, and it has found in Bill Bryson its perfect guide.

A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present.  When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of.

Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion that will reaffirm the reader’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.

This is probably not the most uplifting book on the list, but Amsterdam plays a central role in the book. Have a box of tissue nearby while you're reading, you're going to need it.

The story of two Cree friends, Xavier and Elijah, who leave their pristine northern country to end up in the horrific trenches of World War I. Loosely based on the real life of a famous Canadian sniper, the story is told from two first-person views: those of Xavier and his old aunt and only living relative, Niska.

After the war, Niska is taking her wounded nephew back home north to the bush in a canoe. Their trip is the three-day road of the title, which also refers to the journey taken after death. The story of the war is told in flashbacks on this journey as Xavier recovers from morphine addiction. Niska also relates various stories to Xavier, believing there is "medicine in the tale."

Exhausted and on the verge of burnout, Janice poses this questions to herself as she doodles on a notepad at her desk. Surprisingly, the answer isn't as daunting as she expected. With a little math and a lot of determination, Janice cuts back, saves up, and buys herself two years of freedom in Europe. This is a light hearted, true story, that will make you wish you could switch places with the author.

A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the mining pits.…An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House.… A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy.…And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. 

From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families—and into a century that we thought we knew, but that now will never seem the same again. I love to read Ken Follett books and this one is no exception.

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. All of a sudden, Bernadette disappears.

It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic so she flees.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

In apartheid South Africa in 1976, medical student Isaac Muthethe is forced to flee his country after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force. He is smuggled into Botswana, where he is hired as a gardener by a young American woman, Alice, who has abandoned her Ph.D. studies to follow her husband to Africa.

When Isaac goes missing and Alice goes searching for him, what she finds will change her life and inextricably bind her to this sunburned, beautiful land. Eleanor Morse’s rich and intimate portrait of Botswana, and of three people whose intertwined lives are at once tragic and remarkable, is an absorbing and deeply moving story.

This book is also a movie starring Reese Witherspoon if you would rather experience the story that way. Wild is the tale of Cheryl Strayed, who thought she had lost everything when her mother passed away and she was only 22 years old. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed.

Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone.

Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.