In times of self-isolation, these books are sure to help you retreat to your #DreamEscapes. Besides, it’s also a great way to kill time while we wait to #LetItPass, isn’t it? T+L A-List member and author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi recommends these travel books for some armchair escapism.
1. Robert MacFarlane – The Wild Places
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MacFarlane is wise and compassionate. All his books discharge a powerful love for nature: you hear crickets and otters in the stream and the abundance of life itself.
Available to buy here
2. Bruce Chatwin – What Am I Doing Here?
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Funny and as acutely observed as someone conducting an autopsy, this book has stories emergent from travel, whimsical and elusive. Add to cart: In Patagonia.
Available to buy here.
3. Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller – The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples
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Summons the charm and hysteria of Italy through the lens of Napoli, a town at once cunning, boisterous and artful.
Kindle edition available here.
4. Paul Bowles – The Sheltering Sky
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The Sheltering Sky remains a classic ode to a lost time, written with invaluable delicacy. When Paul Theroux – a writer one must read in entirety – asked Bowles for a message to readers he said: “Everything gets worse.” (To me, this means ‘it is just fine at the moment’).
Available to buy here.
5. Pico Iyer – Tropical Classical
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The deepest kind of traveller, and an observer of the Buddhist tradition — which is to say he forgives every foible knowing he may be guilty of it himself — he voyages into the human spirit. His literary awareness of space and form arrives in a kind of a rarified light.
Available to buy here.