An A to Z of iconic books matched with iconic holiday locations.
Whether you’re an ultralight traveller armed with only a Kindle, or you’re a romantic who loves to schlepp your travel-worn paperbacks (lightly battered and eventually swapped with a stranger in a train station for their charmingly worn Dostoyevsky), the novel is an essential item for every successful holiday. Novels help you escape while you’re escaping; they enhance the ebb of stress and the flow of memory making.
The following list has taken the structure of the alphabet and combined it with random jabs at the globe and a scour through the rolodex of iconic place-based novels to come up with the ultimate holiday reads.
America
Percival Everett’s novel James is a contemporary (2024) retelling of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, that classic American tale of two runaways traversing the Mississippi River in search of a better life. Everett ingeniously takes the character of Jim and gives him his own story. The result is funny, engrossing, satisfying and perfect to pack on your USA holiday.
Anywhere, anytime
Lee Child’s Jack Reacher Novels. See all of them ranked right here on The Spinoff.
Berlin
The Wish Child by stonkingly prolific and brilliant New Zealand novelist Catherine Chidgey is set in Berlin of 1939. So while not the most relaxing read, it is fully immersive and ultimately hopeful. Pop it in your pack.
Canada
If you’ve never read Margaret Atwood it would be a crime not to take the chance to catch up while in her home country of Canada. Start with the gripping, chilling and utterly entertaining The Handmaid’s Tale and work your way around Atwood’s list from there.
Denmark
Welcome to the land of the crime novel. Smilla’s Sense of Snow (or Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow) by Peter Høeg is a classic of the genre and will have you staring out at the white expanse suspecting and surmising.
Edinburgh
The capital of Scotland is home of the epic Edinburgh International Book Festival every August where you can spend all your pounds on books. But while there you need to read Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses and Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn. Gripping crime to properly chill you out as you stalk the path of the detectives around Edinburgh’s atmospheric twists and turns. And if you’re after something absolutely extraordinary then Jenni Fagan’s wildly brilliant novel Luckenbooth will have you hooning around Edinburgh finding locations from the book: no better guide to a city than from a novel that knows it inside out.
Finland
It’s hard to think of anything more relaxing than reading Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book while exploring Finland. Jansson is world famous for creating the Moomins and a little less famous for The Summer Book which is a charming story of a young girl, her father and her grandmother on their summer island in the Gulf of Finland. It’s deceptively deep for something so short and sharp.
Greece
This is your chance to read Homer’s The Odyssey and in the new translation by Emily Wilson which is just magnificent. When you’re lying on the beach on Mykonos you’ll need The Magus by John Fowles (for creepy and incredible) and/or Circe by Madeline Miller (a beguiling retelling of the Classical myth).
Hawke’s Bay
Turns out there are heaps of amazing writers in Hawke’s Bay including Catherine Robertson who has just released a pair of spicy romance novels set among the grape vines. While not technically set in Hawke’s Bay wineries, Robertson has drawn from her own winey/viney surrounds to create proper good saucy holiday reads to accompany some sampling of pinot noir at Craggy Range.
Iceland
New Zealand writer Dominic Hoey’s Iceland was written (mostly) while in Iceland on residency. You can read about his adventures in Iceland (the place) and Iceland (the book) on The Spinoff, here.
Italy
It’s Nicky Pellegrino. If you want extremely enjoyable, relaxing and food-filled novels to go with your extremely enjoyable, relaxing and food-filled jaunt to Italy then pack a stash of Pellegrino. You’ll find them all ranked on The Spinoff here.
Also, given the fresh interest in The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (thanks to Andrew ‘hot priest’ Scott’s turn as the lead in the Netflix adaptation: though the series was interminable and missed the spark of fun that the novel has), this utterly entrancing crime novel deserves to sightsee along with you.
Japan
What the world needs, and what you need while on holiday in Japan, is the Days at the Morisaki Bookshop series by Satoshi Yagosawa. Set in Tokyo, these stories are designed for holiday makers zipping fluidly about on pristine public transport.
Korea
Han Kang! This year’s Nobel Prize Winner for Literature is the one and very only Korean writer Han Kang whose novels are like nothing else. Not relaxing per se, but affecting and will take you straight to the trembling heart of the human condition. Start with the International Booker Prize winning novel, The Vegetarian, and work your way out from there.
London
You’ve watched every season of Slow Horses and marvelled at Gary Oldman’s slimy brilliance. When in London it would be a sloppy crime not to take your chance to go deeper in the fringes of M15 and Mick Herron’s bloody excellent books upon which the TV series was based. Here’s book one. On you go.
Mumbai
While in Mumbai take a journey back to the Mumbai of the 90s with Amrita Mahale’s novel Milk Teeth which follows the friendship of two children as they and their city grow and change.
Nigeria
There are so many astonishing Nigerian writers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wole Soyinka, Chigozie Obioma, Teju Cole. But the book to take with you is Lagoon, the latest novel by science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor. Lagoon is a gripping thriller that traces the first contact between aliens and the people of Lagos. You’ll be immersed in the fictional place at night after a satisfying day in the real one.
Oman
Way back in 2019 Jokha Alharthi won the International Booker Prize with the English translation of her luminous novel Celestial Bodies. Read this atmospheric, lively intergenerational story on the plane before you touch down in beautiful Muscat.
Paris
While everyone else schlepps to Shakespeare & Co to get their hardback of Hemingway, you can have a lot more fun with Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers, about a young girl who goes to Paris to find her mother and learn to dart between chimneys with a gang of street urchins who take the city by height and by night.
Queensland
Alexis Wright is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers and her second novel Carpentaria is set in Queensland which makes it top of the list for your holiday reading. When the book was published in 2007, Wright wrote this fascinating essay that explains what the novel is about and what she was trying to do: “My new novel Carpentaria attempts to portray the world of Indigenous Australia as being in constant opposition between different spaces of time.” By no means a light read, but one that might just be the book you’ll never forget, especially if you read it in the place that inspired it.
Romania
One word: Dracula (see also: Whitby). Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel in which a young lawyer tells of his meeting with Count Dracula while in Transylvania must be read while in the area. Also The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, a modern take, which is impeccable.
Seaside holidays
Hands down the best book about holidays is The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff. First published in 1931, this winsome novel traces a family holiday to a seaside town in England. It covers the tangles that families can get into when uprooted from home and habit, and the gentle transformations that relocating, just for a bit, can offer.
Switzerland
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is apparently going to get yet another film remake which means that wherever you are now is the time to finally read/reread this gothic classic. Really, please. It’s astonishing. And if you are lucky enough to be travelling to the land of mountain villages, chic cities and cow bells then do not fail to pack this stunning novel written by Shelley when she was just 18 years old.
Tauranga
If you’re planning on taking a trip to sunny Tauranga this summer then please may I suggest that you relive your youth and journey back into the catalogue of one Sherryl Jordan? Jordan died last year and left us all with a stack of beautifully original fantasy novels like Winter of Fire, The Jupiter Game, Rocco, The Wednesday Wizard, Tanith and many more. Jordan lived in Tauranga for many, many years so you could do a little pilgrimage even while your mind is travelling her imagined worlds.
Ubud
Ubud has a lush writers festival every October and while there you can add ‘read’ to Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Tip: skip the Julia Roberts film. The book is a gazillion times better.)
Viêt Nam
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of The Mountains Sing, a stunning, epic novel about one family, many generations, and their survival through the Viêt Nam War.
Whitby (UK)
See above, Romania.
Xagħra
Xagħra is the main city on the island of Gozo, Malta which was an island location for Game of Thrones. So you could drag some George R. R. Martin with you while you visit this very popular and historic spot.
Yorkshire
From the sweeping Dales of the North to the rugged moors of the West, the folk from Yorkshire have produced some ripper reads. Top of the list is of course the Brontë sisters. There’s nothing like reading Wuthering Heights and then visiting the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth where you can immerse in the wuthering.
Zambia
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell is one of the greatest epic novels of the past decade. It traces Zamibian history through a series of compelling and surprising characters and with one of the most astonishing endings of any book, ever. Take it with you to settle in with on the banks of the Zambezi.