Here are 100 books that Roumeli fans have personally recommended if you like
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Perhaps it was being born in a large seaport – Liverpool – where I would watch from our front window the great liners steaming out on the tide that made me love travel and seeing the world. My book about the great age of British travel, A Corkscrew is Most Useful was the product of this obsession with how people travel, what they see, how they interpret their journeys. I have also written about Bruce Chatwin, one of the most original of modern travellers, and in my 2016 book Crossings I have explored the idea of borders, real and metaphorical, which figure so largely in the life of anyone moving from country to country and define our sense of belonging and identity.
I love this book because Lawrence is one of the great travel writers. His highly individual style of writing, so full of energy and life, makes Mexico in the 1920s come alive. In the marvellous opening chapter you are with him in his Mexican garden, seeing what he sees, smelling what he smells, hearing what he hears. Very few travel writers have this gift and it’s hard to believe that this book is nearly 100 years old when it is as fresh as the day it was written.
Much of D.H. Lawrence's life was defined by his passion for travel and it was those peripatetic wanderings that gave life to some of his greatest novels. In the 1920s Lawrence travelled several times to Mexico, where he was fascinated by the clash of beauty and brutality, purity and darkness that he observed there. The diverse and evocative essays that make up Mornings in Mexico - 'Market Day', 'Dance of the Sprouting Corn', 'The Hopi Snake Dance' - bring to life the elemental simplicity of the Zapotec Indians in Mexico, the intense, dark rhythms of the Indians in the American…
I’ve always wanted to travel and have always been obsessed with exploring the natural world with my camera. Over the past 30 years I’ve been lucky to film in 120+ countries and meet thousands of inspiring people in the most unlikely of places. Experience has taught me that there are certain core positive traits that unify us all and help bind us to the natural world within which we live. The books I’ve chosen remind me of how complicated, beautiful, and precious; and how full of wonder and mystery our planet is. They have helped inspire me to pack my bags and get out there to explore it for myself.
Chatwin’s classic is a must read for anyone interested in the concept of the human relationship with landscape and spirituality.
A deeply thoughtful book that made me think very hard about my own place in the world, about how I connect to and interact with nature, and where my life’s journey may be leading me. By focusing on the quality of journey the destination will take care of itself.
This Moleskine-bound edition is sold together with a blank Moleskine notebook, for recording your own thoughts and adventures. Perfect for the travel writers of the future.
The Songlines is Bruce Chatwin's magical account of his journey across the length and breadth of Australia, following the invisible and ancient pathways that are said to criss-cross the land. Chatwin recorded his travels in his favourite notebook, which he would usually buy in bulk in a particular stationery shop in Paris. But when the manufacturer went out of business, he was told "Le vrai moleskine n'est plus". A decade after its publication, on…
I am passionate about the written word and effective communication. My articles and reviews have been published in major newspapers and magazines and for two decades I taught writing on the university level. Travel writing is a subset of my experience as editor of the best-selling In Mind literary anthologies and editor and writer for more than a dozen guidebooks. In addition, I have been “first reader” and editor for prospective authors and shepherded several books to publication, the most recent Red Clay Suzie by first-time novelist Jeffrey Lofton (publication January 2023).
Like many World War I veterans, British Gerald Brenan left the army depressed and dispirited. He moved to Spain and settled in Andalusia, specifically the small village of Yegen. Like many ex-pats, he wanted a simpler life.
He had a small house and humble furnishings but brought his entire library—2000 books—from England. Although he was isolated, Brenan had many visitors, including Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Hemingway. He died at 92 in Spain, of course. Brenan’s book is one of the first “ex-pat” Spanish memoirs and sets the standard for the genre.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
Perhaps it was being born in a large seaport – Liverpool – where I would watch from our front window the great liners steaming out on the tide that made me love travel and seeing the world. My book about the great age of British travel, A Corkscrew is Most Useful was the product of this obsession with how people travel, what they see, how they interpret their journeys. I have also written about Bruce Chatwin, one of the most original of modern travellers, and in my 2016 book Crossings I have explored the idea of borders, real and metaphorical, which figure so largely in the life of anyone moving from country to country and define our sense of belonging and identity.
Colin Thubron is our best living British travel writer whose books about China, India, Russia, the Middle East, and many other places are essential for anyone thinking of visiting those places. In the spirit of the great British Victorian travellers he travels alone, with the minimum of baggage except for his formidably well-informed mind which makes each book an education as well as a pleasure to read because of his wit and lightness of touch. He conveys so well the feel of a journey – which makes the title of this book so appropriate – and knows how to talk to the people he meets on his 600-mile tramp on foot around the island of Cyprus shortly before the conflict erupted there. It made my own journey to Cyprus so much more fruitful and enjoyable.
Cyprus, spring 1972. Tensions are rising between the Greek South and the Turkish North. Within two years, the country will become divided.
It is at this distinctive time in history British travel writer Colin Thubron embarks on a 600 mile trek across the country. Moving from Greek villages to Turkish towns, the author of Shadow of the Silk Road and Night of Fire provides a profound look into the people of Cyprus - from Orthodox monks to wedding parties to peasant families - against the landscape of a beautiful Mediterranean island on the eve of chaos and tragedy. A remarkable…
I became passionate about ancient Greece as a teenager when I studied the ancient languages and history at school. I was also lapping up ancient Greece on film—back then the so-so Burton-Taylor Cleopatra really impressed. I got enthused by historical novels too, Mary Renault’s especially. My first visit to Greece as a university student hooked me on modern Greece as well. Since then, I’ve become a professional academic specialising in ancient Greece and have been lucky enough to develop a lifelong relationship with modern as well as ancient Greeks. I lived in Greece for six years in my twenties, and have gone back repeatedly ever since. I’ve published widely on Greece’s ancient history and archaeology.
This book is a gem for lovers of Greece and of superlative English prose.
For me the book is far and away the best evocation of a wild and remote part of Greece that I got to know and treasure when tramping through its olive fields in search of ancient inscriptions. Leigh Fermor was incapable of writing a dull sentence.
His imagination allied with what he observed himself in his wanderings combine to bring out all the strangeness of Mani’s history of brigands and vendettas, of villages bristling with defensive towers and of fishermen descended—perhaps—from Byzantine emperors.
This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe.
Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and…
I fell in love with Greece 50 years ago, when I had the good fortune of spending a summer on my father’s native island of Ikaria. I bagged my first writing job four years later when I wrote a guide to all the Greek islands. As a travel writer I tend to fall in love with all the places I write about! But Greece is where I feel most at home, and it has inspired some truly memorable travel books. I hope you like some of my all-time favorites.
In 1947, archaeologist Kevin Andrews went to the Peloponnese on a Fulbright fellowship to study the Crusader castles and found a country in the midst of a civil war. He was one of the few foreigners there at the time, which his book vividly brings to life.. after a first rather idyllic description of stomping on grapes with friends on Paros he enters another world. Yet he was so moved by the humanity of the villagers in a period of great poverty, suspicion, and turmoil that he made Greece his home, and wrote numerous other books about Greece, but this is his best… about a period I hope is never repeated.
"One of the great and lasting books about Greece."—Patrick Leigh Fermor
"An intense and compelling account of an educated, sensitive archaeologist wandering the back country during the civil war. Half a century on, still one of the best books on Greece as it was before 'development.'"—The Rough Guide to the Greek Islands
"He also is in love with the country…but he sees the other side of that dazzling medal or moon…If you want some truth about Greece, here it is."—Louis MacNeice, The Observer
"One of the best and most honest books about the modern Greeks."—E. R. Dodds
At the age of forty-nine, Laurie Woodford rents out her house, packs her belongings into two suitcases, and leaves her life in upstate New York to relocate to Seoul, South Korea. What begins as an opportunity to teach college English in Asia evolves into a nomadic adventure.
I wrote my first thriller at age 8 about a girl who ran away and joined the circus. For later works, I, a pediatric physician, did opt to follow my English teachers’ guidance to write about what you know, including science, medicine, psychology, journalism, and my twin home countries of America and Greece. As YS Pascal, I wrote the Zygan Emprise Trilogy, which blended ancient Greek history, mythology, and literature. As Linda Reid, I co-authored the award-winning Sammy Greene thriller series with Dr. Deborah Shlian and was eager to fly investigative reporter Sammy and her ex-cop friend Gus Pappajohn to the shores of modern Athens to solve an ancient and modern mystery.
Frederic Kakis, a brilliant scientist and moving writer, shares a personal story of survival and fortitude for a Jewish family in Northern Greece during the Nazi occupation. Close to 80,000 were relocated to Nazi concentration campus far from their homes in Thessaloniki and close to 60,000 did not survive the Holocaust. Dr. Kakis describes the terror experienced as well as the courage shown by Greek Jews and their local Christian neighbors during this tragic invasion, and how their efforts helped as many of the vulnerable as possible survive.
Armed only with sheer guts and determination this Jewish family took on the whole German Army. Stubbornly refusing to surrender, they remained defiant throughout the occupation of Greece and survived by fighting and outsmarting the Nazis. This is their fascinating story.
I wrote my first thriller at age 8 about a girl who ran away and joined the circus. For later works, I, a pediatric physician, did opt to follow my English teachers’ guidance to write about what you know, including science, medicine, psychology, journalism, and my twin home countries of America and Greece. As YS Pascal, I wrote the Zygan Emprise Trilogy, which blended ancient Greek history, mythology, and literature. As Linda Reid, I co-authored the award-winning Sammy Greene thriller series with Dr. Deborah Shlian and was eager to fly investigative reporter Sammy and her ex-cop friend Gus Pappajohn to the shores of modern Athens to solve an ancient and modern mystery.
As an author of mystery-thrillers, including the Sherlock Holmes Pastiche, “Elementary, My Dear Spock” as well as a longtime fan of Agatha Christie, I was drawn to the appeal of an ancient Greek “detective”, Heracles Pontor investigating murders in Plato’s Athens. And, Somoza does not disappoint, inviting us to share Pontor’s journey down a rabbit hole that grows ever more intriguing and dangerous page by page. Somoza welcomes us with a beautifully translated murder mystery that soon envelopes us in a fascinating exploration of Plato, reality, and, as reflected in the original Spanish title, the Cave of Ideas.
THE ATHENIAN MURDERS is a brilliant, very entertaining and absolutely original literary mystery, revolving round two intertwined riddles. In classical Athens, one of the pupils of Plato's Academy is found dead. His idealistic teacher suspects that this wasn't an accident and asks Herakles, known as the 'Decipherer of Enigmas', to investigate the death and ultimately a dark, irrational and subversive cult. The second plot unfolds in parallel through the footnotes of the translator of the text. As he proceeds with his work, he becomes increasingly convinced that the original author has hidden a second meaning, which can be brought to…
For as long as I can remember, I have been deeply interested in how people understand and use the past. Whether it is a patient reciting a personal account of his or her past to a therapist or a scholar writing a history in many volumes, I find that I am consistently fascinated by the importance and different meanings we assign to what has gone before us. What I love about Herodotus is that he reveals something new in each reading. He has a profound humanity that he brings to the genre that he pretty much invented. And to top it all off, he is a great storyteller!
Paul Cartledge is one of the best Greek historians alive today. Though profoundly knowledgeable about Greece and its history, he writes in a way that non-specialists can follow and appreciate.
I particularly like this book because, through a series of antitheses (Greek/barbarian, free/enslaved, male/female, myth/history), Cartledge gives the reader a splendid picture of the intellectual background against which Herodotus was writing his history.
I also like that, by comparing several contemporary authors with Herodotus, Cartledge can show (explicitly or implicitly) what is distinctive about Herodotus and his worldview.
This book provides an original and challenging answer to the question: 'Who were the Classical Greeks?' Paul Cartledge - 'one of the most theoretically alert, widely read and prolific of contemporary ancient historians' (TLS) - here examines the Greeks and their achievements in terms of their own self-image, mainly as it was presented by the supposedly objective historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon.
Many of our modern concepts as we understand them were invented by the Greeks: for example, democracy, theatre, philosophy, and history. Yet despite being our cultural ancestors in many ways, their legacy remains rooted in myth and the…
Marianne Bohr and her husband, about to turn sixty, are restless for adventure. They decide on an extended, desolate trek across the French island of Corsica — the GR20, Europe’s toughest long-distance footpath — to challenge what it means to grow old. Part travelogue, part buddy story, part memoir, The…
For four decades, I have written about art for publications in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. I have interviewed, among other artists, Frank Stella, Mary Ellen Mark, Dale Chihuly, Deng Lin (the daughter of Deng Xiaoping), the most celebrated Vietnamese contemporary painters, and the leading Japanese ceramicists. My ideal vacation is to wander the cobblestone streets of Italy, walking into a church to see the art of Caravaggio, Raphael, and Bernini. On a trip to Venice, I saw the immense illusionist ceiling painting by Giovanni Fumiani in the church of San Pantalon. Looking up at angels swirling in heaven, the idea for my second novel was born.
For my high school sophomore history teacher, world history was only Greece under Pericles and England under Elizabeth I. I went to Greece under her spell, and ever since, I have been drawn to books about Greece—fiction and non-fiction.
This book is about a fictional Greek island at the end of the Ottoman empire, an English con man caught up in his archaeological con, a beautiful artist (played by a young Helen Mirren in the film version), greedy government officials, and an informer who fears for his life is our unreliable narrator. It makes for an engrossing novel of adventure and ideas that holds up on a second reading after over forty years.
