There is no better way to prepare for a journey than to lose yourself in a book set in the place you’re about to visit. A great travel read does something a guidebook simply cannot, it gets under the skin of a destination, fills it with characters, atmosphere, and emotion, and means that by the time you arrive, you already feel a deep, personal connection to the streets, landscapes, and stories unfolding around you. Here at Untravelled Paths, we are firm believers that the best trips begin long before you reach the airport. So settle in, put the kettle on, and allow us to introduce you to the books we think every traveller should read before visiting these extraordinary destinations.
Whether you’re a voracious reader working through a towering to-be-read pile or someone who saves their books strictly for the beach, this list has something for every kind of traveller. These aren’t just books about places – they are books that will make you feel those places in your bones, long before you set foot there.
Romania — Along the Enchanted Way: Ten Years in Transylvania by William Blacker
📖 Best for: Romantics, slow travellers, and anyone enchanted by a vanishing world
If there is one book that perfectly captures the spirit of rural Transylvania, its extraordinary beauty, its timeless rhythms, and its quiet defiance of the modern world, it is William Blacker’s luminous memoir. Blacker, a young Englishman, arrived in Romania in the early 1990s, fell hopelessly in love with the country and its people, and ended up spending a decade living amongst the farming communities of the Carpathian foothills.
What follows is one of the finest travel memoirs of recent decades: a portrait of a world of horse-drawn carts, hand-scythed meadows, and villages where the rhythms of medieval life had survived, almost intact, into the 21st century. Blacker writes about Transylvania with a tenderness and precision that is genuinely beautiful, and his account of the Roma and Saxon communities he lived amongst is sympathetic, vivid, and deeply moving.
Read this before a trip to Romania and you will arrive with a profound understanding of and affection for a country that is far richer, stranger, and more magnificent than its vampire mythology suggests. The landscapes Blacker describes, the food he eats, the festivals he attends – you will want to find every last one of them. And in rural Transylvania, remarkably, many of them still exist.
✈️ Planning a trip to Romania? Explore our Transylvania travel guides for itineraries, tips, and hidden gem recommendations.
South Africa — The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
📖 Best for: History lovers, adventure seekers, and anyone moved by stories of resilience
Set against the backdrop of South Africa in the 1930s and 40s, Bryce Courtenay’s magnificent coming-of-age novel follows Peekay, a young English-speaking boy navigating the brutal realities of apartheid-era South Africa with courage, intelligence, and an unbreakable spirit. It is, at its heart, a story about the power of the individual to rise above circumstances, but it is also one of the finest evocations of the South African landscape, culture, and social history ever committed to the page.
Courtenay writes about South Africa with the authority and passion of someone who knows it intimately – the vast, sun-bleached landscapes of the Highveld, the red dust of the bush, the complex, painful social divisions of a country in turmoil. Reading The Power of One before visiting South Africa will give you a visceral, emotional understanding of the country’s history that no textbook could provide, and will make the landscapes you travel through feel weighted with meaning and story.
It is also, quite simply, a tremendously good read – thrilling, funny, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting. Pack it for the long-haul flight and you will barely notice the hours passing.
✈️ Planning a trip to South Africa? Browse our South Africa destination guides for inspiration on where to go and what to see.
Colombia — One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
📖 Best for: Literary travellers, dreamers, and anyone who believes in the magic of a place
There is perhaps no more famous novel in the history of Latin American literature and with very good reason. Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, the book that effectively introduced the world to magical realism, is a sweeping, hypnotic saga following seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo. It is a book that feels like Colombia itself: lush, intense, bewildering, deeply human, and shot through with an almost supernatural beauty.
Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude before visiting Colombia won’t give you a literal guide to the country – Macondo is fictional, after all, though it is believed to be inspired by García Márquez’s hometown of Aracataca in the Caribbean coast region. What it will give you is something far more valuable: a feel for the Colombian soul. The heat, the passion, the fatalism, the joy, the violence, the tenderness – all of it is here, rendered in prose so extraordinary it has the quality of a dream you can’t quite shake.
Colombia is a country that rewards those who arrive with open eyes and an open heart, and no book opens both quite like this one. Read it slowly, savour every sentence, and arrive in Cartagena, Medellín, or the coffee region ready to see magic everywhere because in Colombia, it genuinely is.
✈️ Planning a trip to Colombia? Discover our Colombia travel guides for everything from Cartagena’s colonial streets to the coffee region’s misty hillsides.
Bosnia & Herzegovina — The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
📖 Best for: History lovers, cultural travellers, and anyone seeking to understand the Balkans
Ivo Andrić won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, and The Bridge on the Drina is the book that sealed his legacy. A sweeping historical novel spanning four centuries of life in the Bosnian town of Višegrad, it uses the great Ottoman bridge over the Drina River as its fixed, unchanging centrepiece – a witness to the generations of people, empires, and conflicts that wash past it like the river itself.
It is a book of extraordinary scope and humanity, and it is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the extraordinarily complex tapestry of cultures, religions, and histories that makes the Balkans, and Bosnia in particular, so endlessly fascinating. Andrić writes about the coexistence of Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish communities with a nuance and compassion that feels more relevant than ever, and his portrait of a place caught perpetually between East and West resonates deeply with the Bosnia you will encounter when you travel there today.
Visit Višegrad after reading this novel and standing on that bridge becomes one of the most quietly moving travel moments you can have in the Balkans. It is the kind of book that changes the way you see a place and that is the highest compliment we can pay any travel read.
✈️ Planning a trip to Bosnia & Herzegovina? Explore our Bosnia travel guides and discover one of Europe’s most extraordinary and underrated destinations.
Morocco — The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
📖 Best for: Soul seekers, first-time travellers, and anyone standing at a crossroads
Paulo Coelho’s beloved fable follows Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd boy who travels to the Egyptian pyramids in pursuit of treasure and discovers, along the way, that the journey itself is the destination. Much of the story unfolds across the Moroccan landscape – the souks, the desert, the ancient trading routes and Coelho captures the country’s atmosphere of mystery, colour, and spiritual possibility with a lightness of touch that makes it irresistible.
The Alchemist is one of the bestselling books in history for a reason: its message, that the universe conspires to help those who pursue their dreams, is simple, universal, and deeply comforting. But it is also a genuinely evocative portrait of Morocco as a place of transformation, where the noise and intensity of the medinas, the silence of the Sahara, and the warmth of the people combine to create an experience that feels, for many travellers, genuinely life-changing.
Read it on the plane to Marrakech or Fez and arrive ready to follow your own legend through the winding streets of the medina. Morocco has a way of making Coelho’s philosophy feel not like a self-help cliché but like a lived, breathing truth.
✈️ Planning a trip to Morocco? Browse our Morocco travel guides for medina explorations, desert adventures, and everything in between.
Italy — Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
📖 Best for: Solo travellers, food lovers, and anyone in need of a fresh start
Say what you will about the cultural phenomenon that is Eat, Pray, Love and plenty of people have said plenty, but Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir of self-discovery across Italy, India, and Bali contains some of the most joyful, sensuous writing about Italian food, language, and daily life that you will find anywhere. The Italy section alone, set largely in Rome, is worth the price of the book.
Gilbert arrives in Rome broken-hearted, knowing nobody, speaking no Italian, and with a single, gloriously uncomplicated mission: to eat as much extraordinary food as possible and learn to enjoy her own company. What follows is a love letter to la dolce vita – to Roman pizza, Neapolitan gelato, the musicality of the Italian language, and the particular, irreplaceable pleasure of sitting at a pavement café with a coffee and absolutely nowhere to be.
For those planning their first trip to Italy, or returning after years away then Eat, Pray, Love is a reminder of what makes the country so enduringly magical: its food, its beauty, its insistence on the importance of pleasure, and its extraordinary capacity to make even the most world-weary traveller feel completely, utterly alive. Read the Italy chapters before your trip and you will arrive hungry in the very best possible sense.
✈️ Planning a trip to Italy? Discover our Italy travel guides for city breaks, coastal escapes, and culinary adventures across the peninsula.
Albania — Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare
📖 Best for: Literary travellers, history enthusiasts, and anyone heading off the beaten track
Ismail Kadare is Albania’s greatest writer, a Nobel Prize contender for decades and a literary giant whose work has introduced the world to a country that remains, for most readers, almost entirely unknown. Chronicle in Stone, his most accessible and beloved novel, is the perfect introduction to both the writer and the country.
Set in the ancient Ottoman city of Gjirokastër during the Second World War, Kadare’s own home city, the novel is narrated through the eyes of a young boy watching the war arrive in his extraordinary hillside town of grey stone towers and labyrinthine streets. It is a book of remarkable richness: funny, poetic, melancholy, and utterly alive with the sights, sounds, and textures of a world on the cusp of violent change.
Gjirokastër is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Albania’s most visited destinations and reading Chronicle in Stone before you go transforms the experience completely. You will walk its cobbled streets with Kadare’s characters at your shoulder, see the stone towers as he saw them, and understand the city’s extraordinary character in a way that no guidebook could ever convey. It is, in the truest sense, the ideal companion for a trip to one of the Balkans’ most remarkable and underrated destinations.
✈️ Planning a trip to Albania? Explore our Albania travel guides and discover why this is one of Europe’s most exciting emerging destinations.
Georgia — The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili
📖 Best for: Epic novel lovers, history enthusiasts, and anyone with Georgia on their travel list
At nearly a thousand pages, The Eighth Life is not a book you read casually, it is a book you inhabit. Nino Haratischvili’s extraordinary saga follows six generations of a Georgian family from the early 20th century through the Soviet era and beyond, weaving together personal drama, historical catastrophe, love, loss, and the enduring power of memory into one of the most ambitious and rewarding novels of recent years.
It is, quite simply, the definitive literary portrait of Georgia – a country that has lived through more history than most, and whose complex, painful, and beautiful story is rendered here with breathtaking skill. Haratischvili writes about Tbilisi, the Caucasus, and the peculiar intensity of Georgian life and culture with an insider’s authority and a storyteller’s gift, and the result is a book that makes you feel you know Georgia, its streets, its smells, its impossible contradictions before you’ve ever set foot there.
Start it at least a few weeks before your trip; you’ll need the time. But arrive in Tbilisi having finished it and the city will feel like somewhere you have always, in some deep and inexplicable way, belonged.
✈️ Planning a trip to Georgia? Browse our Georgia travel guides for everything from Tbilisi’s old town to the Caucasus Mountains.
Finland — The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna
📖 Best for: Nature lovers, escapists, and anyone who has ever dreamed of dropping everything
Arto Paasilinna’s slim, deadpan comic masterpiece is one of the most beloved novels in Finnish literary history and one of the most quietly radical books about the relationship between humans and the natural world ever written. A burnt-out Helsinki journalist accidentally injures a young hare with his car, decides on impulse to take the animal and disappear into the Finnish wilderness, and proceeds to live the kind of life most of us only fantasise about: free, elemental, and utterly liberated from the demands of modern existence.
The Year of the Hare is funny, genuinely, warmly, unexpectedly funny but it is also a deeply felt love letter to Finland’s extraordinary landscape: its vast forests, its thousands of lakes, its silence, its seasons, and the particular Finnish relationship with nature that is unlike anything found elsewhere in Europe. Reading it will give you an entirely new way of seeing the Finnish countryside, and a profound appreciation for the concept of mökki, the Finnish tradition of the summer cabin, that will make you want to rent one immediately.
It is also a book about freedom, and there is no better place to read about freedom than Finland, where the landscape seems to offer it in abundance to anyone willing to slow down and look.
✈️ Planning a trip to Finland? Discover our Finland travel guides for northern lights adventures, lake district escapes, and Helsinki city breaks.
Ethiopia — Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
📖 Best for: Adventurous readers, medical drama fans, and anyone drawn to Africa’s most ancient civilisation
Abraham Verghese’s sweeping novel is one of the great medical dramas in modern fiction, but it is also one of the finest portraits of Ethiopia ever written. Set largely in Addis Ababa across several tumultuous decades of the country’s history, it follows twin brothers born in a mission hospital to a nun and a surgeon, tracing their lives through the extraordinary political and social upheavals of 20th-century Ethiopia with compassion, intelligence, and a storyteller’s instinct for the perfectly chosen detail.
Verghese, himself a doctor and the son of Indian immigrants to Ethiopia, writes about the country with a deep, affectionate authority. His Addis Ababa is vivid, chaotic, beautiful, and heartbreaking by turns: a city of contrasts, of ancient tradition and violent modernity, of extraordinary human resilience and devastating loss. The Ethiopian landscape, the highlands, the eucalyptus forests, the red dust roads, comes alive in his pages in a way that will make the country feel startlingly familiar when you arrive.
Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest civilisations and one of the most rewarding travel destinations on the African continent. Read Cutting for Stone first and you will arrive not as a tourist but as someone who already, in some small way, understands.
✈️ Planning a trip to Ethiopia? Explore our Ethiopia travel guides for ancient churches, extraordinary landscapes, and one of Africa’s most fascinating cultures.
For Every Journey — The Travels of Marco Polo by Marco Polo
📖 Best for: Every traveller, everywhere, always
We couldn’t compile a list of the best travel reads without including the book that, for many, invented travel writing as we know it. Dictated by Marco Polo to a fellow prisoner in a Genoese gaol in 1298, The Travels recounts his extraordinary 24-year journey from Venice through the Middle East, Central Asia, China, and beyond – a journey so vast and so improbable that his contemporaries largely refused to believe it had happened.
Reading Marco Polo today is a peculiar and thrilling experience. Parts of it feel uncannily modern – his eye for detail, his curiosity about other cultures, his delight in the strangeness of the world are recognisable instincts in any seasoned traveller. Other parts feel like pure fantasy: tales of unicorns, dog-headed men, and cities paved with gold that blur the line between reportage and legend in ways that are never entirely resolved.
But that ambiguity is, perhaps, the point. The Travels of Marco Polo is a reminder that travel has always been, at its heart, about the stories we tell and the stories we bring home. It is a book that will make you want to go everywhere, see everything, and return full of tales that no one quite believes. Which is, when you think about it, the very best kind of journey.
Pack it. Read it anywhere. It belongs on every traveller’s shelf.
The Final Chapter: Your Reading List Awaits
The best trips are the ones that stay with you long after you’ve unpacked — and the best books are the ones that make a destination feel like a place you carry inside you, not just somewhere you’ve visited. Every title on this list has the power to do exactly that.
Whether you’re heading to the forests of Finland, the souks of Morocco, the mountains of Georgia, or the ancient stone streets of Albania, there is a book on this list waiting to transform your journey from a holiday into something altogether more profound. Read it before you go, pack it in your bag, and see how differently a place looks when you arrive with its stories already alive in your imagination.
Ready to find your next untravelled path? Browse our full collection of destination guides, travel itineraries, hidden gem recommendations and start planning the trip that goes with your next great read.
We’d love to know – have you read any of these books before visiting their home countries? Did it change your experience? Drop your thoughts in the comments below, and feel free to suggest any titles we might have missed. Happy reading, and even happier travels.
Written by James Chisnall
The post The Best Books to Read Before Taking an Untravelled Path appeared first on Untravelled Paths.
from Untravelled Paths https://blog.untravelledpaths.com/blog/books-to-read-before-taking-an-untravelled-path/
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