Roving Writers

Wander along with five intrepid authors in these vivid, astonishing works of travel literature. In Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s twentieth-century autobiography An African in Greenland, the writer and explorer migrates north from his home in Togo to live for a time with the Inuit in Greenland—a trek that lasts nearly a decade and leads Kpomassie up the west African coast, through Europe, and finally to his arctic destination.

A contemporary of Jane Austen, Eliza Fay recounts two arduous voyages from England to India by ship, mule, and carriage in her vivacious Original Letters from India. Sybille Bedford’s intoxicatingly funny A Visit to Don Otavio narrates her tour through pre–World War II Mexico with her friend, E., and a basket chock full of food and alcohol.

In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s beloved travel trilogy, which includes A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and the posthumous The Broken Road, the British author journeys by foot from Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930s. Vigorous, colorful, and unabashedly erudite, the three books have cemented Fermor’s reputation as one of the greatest travel writers of the twentieth century.