Esteemed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk rapidly became a household name overnight after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. A handful of her works have been available in translation prior to this ascent, with Flights being her most well-known. There is no coherent storyline, no cast of characters. Instead, Flights is a collection of vignettes with travel at its heart. It spotlights how travel heals, how travel scratches at the dark inside us, how travel is transient, and everything else in-between. Aside from these meditations, the novel also interweaves stories about the body and travel amongst its pages, starring real-life individuals like Chopin, and the return of his heart to Warsaw, post-humously. For avid travellers who are most in touch with themselves when seeing the world, Flights is for you.
Any Human Heart is ambitious in scope as it is in delivery. The tome sets itself as the compiled journals of fictional author Logan Mountstuart lifetime, beginning from his schoolboy days in Uruguay to life in England, moves throughout Europe and America, all unfurling in-between, during and after the cataclysmic world wars. There’s a raw realism to Mountstuart’s voice that makes you laugh when he does, and ache with him as he is plunged into the agonies that truly test the human heart. Poignant and sharp is this epistolary novel, and it’s worth a read for perspective on what it means to struggle.
Pachinko has remained a bestseller since its release in 2017, and for good reason: this groundbreaker is the first novel about the Korean-Japanese diaspora and wartime struggles written in English, and while the subject matter seems expansive, this multi-generational epic manages to be concise with what it addresses. Though Panchinko does not travel vastly through space (triangulating mainly through Japan, Korea and New York), it does stretch across time it and covers such a wide range of issues regarding immigration and identity that remain relevant today. A worthy distraction that’ll stay with you for a long time.
Women develop the ability to conduct electrical currents through their bodies to deadly effects. The world turns upside down overnight with the discovery. Borders shut down, businesses close, schools are put on pause, all as this newfound power and problem gets navigated in Naomi Alderman’s dystopian thriller. The Power is an eerily-familiar novel that demands you keep pace with its gender-focused charge. Racing through continents and weaving in and out of a cast of women and their upheaved lives, this is one for fans of dystopian novels a la Atwood and Huxley.
As a traveller, how are you complicit in perpetuating global inequalities? How are you enabling the colonial hangover many nations are facing by projecting your livin’ la vida loca fantasies on its terrain when you visit? These are a couple of questions Jamaica Kincaid ruminates in A Small Place, a lengthy essay that examines, with wit and ire, what travellers who escape the confines of their banal day-to-day life abroad truly inflict on a space that is still struggling to rise from its imposed downfall, whether it be via capitalism or colonialism. Set in Antigua, but really could be anywhere in Southeast Asia too, this is a text that challenges you to think about your role as a traveller, and how going abroad is never a neutral act.
Historical fiction lovers will thoroughly enjoy Isabel Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea. A pregnant widow and an army doctor are forcibly united by marriage in order to escape Spain after the tribulations of a violent civil war. The embark on a ship bound for Chile, and there, they must start life anew. This bestseller grapples with the big question of finding hope in the unknown, of seeking stability on rocky waters, and it is a literary salve for some real-world issues we’re all trying to cope with right now.
Nature writer Robert McFarlane traverses the unusual in Underland. Travelling overland or oversea is replaced by, quite literally, going under-land as McFarlane takes the reader through what lies beneath our earth’s surface. The subterranean places he visits are definitely armchair travel material for us plebeians because our personal abilities to travel to the depths of Greenland or through underground catacombs are next to none, but with this striking novel, we can. Ten years in the making has given Underland a richness that surpasses its deep, dark subject matter; it also wrestles with the questions about knowledge and the Earth that flutter through our minds before we sleep.
A memoir grounded by mushrooms sounds bizarre, but Long Litt Woon’s story is really one of finding salvation in unexpected places and the power of being alone. Malaysian-born anthropologist Long moves to Norway with her husband, but after he passes unexpectedly, she has to rebuild her life from zero. Struggling to connect amidst detachment, she eventually signs up for a mushroom foraging course that saved her, through hours and hours spent in the woods. Hopeful and freeing, this book is an intriguing one for people who enjoy memoirs that take you places.
Lighthearted travel narratives are all the more necessary during these times, and if you’d like a joyful jaunt, make your bet The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters. After the passing of their mother, the Shergill Sisters are made to reconnect as they honour their mother’s deathbed wish: for the trio to go to India, and go to the Golden Temple in Amritsar to carry out her last rites. It’s a humorous portrait of discovery and family matters, taking one from England to India with a group of women who begin to feel like friends.
Travel is not quite literal with Somewhere Else, Another You, a choose-your-own-adventure novel designed for adults. In that sense, you’re travelling through the multiverse that inspires this novel as you navigate its many ends. The nostalgic factor makes it fun too, so you can easily while away a day lost in its pages. There is a digital accompaniment that gives you a taste of the book here as well.
Where to, today? The living room? Or the balcony?
We’re in the true thick of the COVID-19 crisis, and suffice to say, travel as we used to know it, has really come to a halt.
National borders are closing day by day, and travelling is no longer a luxury, but an impossibility. But Because physically leaving the country is fiction at this point, so many are seeking solace in the power of literature to take their mind elsewhere.
Just because the world is closed off to you does not mean you have to close yourself off to it. Travel writing exists, and as far as we know, book delivery services remain open for you to venture to pick up a tome or two for distraction (though it goes without being said that you should stay home if you’re unwell, and practise rigid personal hygiene if you’re going outdoors).
From short stories about travelling across the globe, a deep dive to what lies beneath the earth’s surface, to a fast-paced dystopian thriller, we pick out ten of our favourite travel-related novels here for you to peruse.
This article first appeared on Lifestyle Asia Singapore.
