The best travel books 2022: our top 10 tips

The best travel books 2022: our top 10 tips

From a dour hiking trip into the mountains to the remote shores of North Sentinel Island, we list the best travel books of 2022

Travel memories are tricky animals. In theory, 400 pages about someone else's trip isn't exactly engaging - like a long-winded version of Jenny from the week-long trip to Tuscany.

In reality, travel memoirs can be entertaining, insightful, funny and heartbreaking. Our best travel books of 2022 include one man's look at slavery and racism in the oldest city on the Mississippi; a mother's attempt to escape poverty by tracking whales to Alaska; and a historian's portrait of the world's most isolated tribe.

Not only do these books reveal new and strange places, they reveal curiosities closer to home. Most importantly, they encourage us all to explore.

The best travel books 2022

Our best travel books of 2022 are listed in order of publication, along with links to Amazon and Goodreads where available.

The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

By Richard Grant17. February, paperbackAmazon | Goodreads

Natchez, the oldest city on the Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was based on slavery and cotton. Today it has the largest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent white families dress up in hoop skirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, but Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay black man as mayor with 91% of the vote.

In The Deepest South of All, travel writer Richard Grant chronicles the complex topography of this historic city. He portrays an eccentric group of characters, including Nellie Jackson, a Cadillac-driving brothel madam who became an FBI informant on the KKK before being killed by one of her customers.

Grant delves into dark themes but with humor and insight, placing The Deepest South of All among the best travel books of 2022.

Soundings: Traveling in the Company of Whales

By Doreen Cunningham3. March, boundAmazon | Goodreads

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Researcher Doreen Cunningham first visited Utqiagvik – Alaska's northernmost town – as a young journalist reporting on climate change in indigenous whaling communities. There she was drawn into an Iñupiaq family and their way of life. She took part in spring whale hunting under the midnight sun, looking for bowhead whales and polar bears amid the receding ice.

Years later, plunged into sudden poverty, Doreen lives in a women's shelter with her young son. Determined to change her life, she sets out on an extraordinary journey, taking Max with her to follow the migration of gray whales all the way north to the Iñupiaq family who took her in, where gray and bowhead whales meet at the melting peak of our planet.

Soundings is the story of a woman reclaiming her life, mile by mile; a child who loves an ocean that is deeply endangered; and a mother who learns from another species how to parent in a time of unprecedented change.

Outlandish: Walking through the unlikely landscapes of Europe

By Nick Hunt28. April, paperbackAmazon | Goodreads

In Outlandish, travel writer Nick Hunt takes us through landscapes that seem out of place in Europe: a patch of arctic tundra in Scotland, a remnant of jungle in Poland, Europe's only true desert in Spain, and the grassland steppes of Hungary.

These anomalies speak of distant regions of the world and make our own continent seem larger, stranger - full of secrets.

Mixing travelogues, nature reports and history - through reindeer nomads, desert wanderers, shamans, Slavic forest gods, Wild West fanatics, eco-activists, horse archers and more - these desolate and rich environments show us that the strange has always been so close.

The Hiking Book from Hell: My Reluctant Attempt to Learn to Love Nature

By Are Kalvø (Author) & Lucy Moffatt (Translator)2nd JunAmazon | Goodreads

Sometime around his forties, Are Kalvø loses his friends... to the mountains. Friends who used to meet him in the pub now go hiking every weekend - and when they show up, all they talk about is feeling at one with nature (without a hint of irony).

When Are realizes that he is the only person who has never posted a selfie on a mountain, he asks himself: is he wrong?

To find out, he buys ridiculously expensive equipment and heads into the forest. The result is a clever and fun take on outdoor culture, but also a reluctant surrender to the powerful allure of nature.

Solo

By Jenny Tough7th JulAmazon | Goodreads

In her boldest project to date, endurance athlete Jenny Tough sets herself a grueling goal: to run alone and without support across mountain ranges on six continents.

It begins with one of the most remote places on earth: the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan. There she has a near-fatal experience after making a navigation error that leads her into the wrong valley and triggers a series of landslides. She decides once she escapes the valley to quit and go home. Instead, she has a little cry, adjusts her ponytail, and carries on.

Solo is the story of their journey across the Tien Shan (Asia), the High Atlas (Africa), the Cordillera Oriental (South America), the Southern Alps (Oceania), the Canadian Rocky Mountains (North America) and the Transylvanian Alps (Europe). ).

Swamp Songs: Traveling Through Marsh, Meadow and Other Wetlands

By Tom Blass21. July, boundAmazon | Goodreads

Wet, dark and full of unpleasant things, swamps, bogs and swamps are considered dangerous places.

Wetlands and their inhabitants have been the object of our suspicion for centuries. We have encroached on them, ripping away not only their fragile beauty, botany and birdlife, but also the carefully calibrated lives of those who thrive within them.

In Swamp Songs, Tom Blass takes us on a journey through these foreign lands. As he travels from Romney Marsh in Kent to Virginia, from Lapland to the Danube Delta, he meets the inhabitants of some of the world's least understood and precarious places, some on the verge of extinction.

Outriders Africa: Essays on Exploration and Return

By Layla Mohamed (Editor), Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (Editor) and contributors, July 26, boundAmazon

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In spring 2020, 10 writers of African origin will travel in pairs across Africa. It's been a strange time to travel and the changing state of the world is reflected in temperature checks at borders, hand sanitizers outside churches, disrupted plans and canceled trips.

With this in mind, their journeys take them from the tourist beaches of Madagascar and the Comoros to the Rastafari town of Shashamane in Ethiopia. Featuring essays, travel journals, letters, and poems, Outriders Africa is a powerful exploration of forgotten family histories that reckons with personal and historical grief and what it truly means to return.

Catch Me If You Can: One Woman's Journey to Every Country in the World

By Jessica Nabongo18. August, boundAmazon | Goodreads

alt="A Woman by the Sea: Cover of Catch me if you can">

Traveler and photographer Jessica Nabongo is the first black woman to visit all 195 countries in the world. In this travelogue and memoir, she shares the highs and lows of her epic journey.

Along the way, she learns to lasso with black cowboys in Oklahoma, makes takoyaki (squid balls) with locals in Japan, and has a harrowing scooter accident in Nauru, the least visited country in the world.

With a list of the top 100 destinations of your adventure, Nabongo shares the diversity, beauty and culture of rarely visited destinations such as Tuvalu, North Korea, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Above all, she inspires would-be travelers to start their own adventure.

Running The World: My world record-breaking adventure to run a marathon in every country on earth

By Nick Butter22. September, paperbackAmazon | Goodreads

In January 2018, athlete Nick Butter ventured onto an icy sidewalk in Toronto, where he took his first steps toward an extraordinary world record: running a marathon in each of the world's 195 countries. Butter spent the next two years literally running around the world, through capitals and deserts, around islands and through spectacular landscapes.

He dodges bullets in Guinea-Bissau, crosses battlefields in Syria, survives a wild dog attack in Tunisia, and runs around an erupting volcano in Guatemala. On the way he is accompanied by local supporters and followers, curious children and confused passers-by. By telling their stories alongside his own, Butter captures the unique spirit of each place he visits and forges a new relationship with the world around him.

The last island

By Adam Goodheart29. SepAmazon | Goodreads

The Last Island almost didn't make our list of the best travel books of 2022 because author Adam Goodheart is one of the very few people to have visited the waters of North Sentinel Island - a place we firmly believe should be left alone.

The Sentinelese are believed to be the most isolated community on Earth, and we believe it should remain that way. After all, they've been known to shoot arrows at anyone who tries to come to land - not exactly a subtle no.

There is no denying that North Sentinel Island continues to fascinate. The Last Island is an attempt to explain why. A work of history and travel, it tells the stories of those drawn to the mystery of North Sentinel, from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern anthropologists. It tells the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes' encounters with the outside world and shows how the web of modernity draws ever closer to the island's shores.

Hike: Adventures on Foot is a round-up of the world's best hiking trails, from relaxing day trips to multi-day adventures, with contributions from our own Peter Watson.

Mission statement: Michaelspb/Shutterstock

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