Wherever your gap year travels take you and however enthralling the trip, there will be moments when a good book to read is just what you need. Whether it is to fill time whilst waiting for a departure, to relax in a quiet moment away from all the excitement or just to close the chapter on your day’s activity, finding room in your rucksack for that work of fiction is something you won’t regret.
Some people opt for a mighty tome to last, such as Tolstoi’s impressively humongous War and Peace or A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, using the time away to embark on reading something that they haven’t found the opportunity to get through before. Others choose a slimmer volume, for example the cult classic Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, then look to trade it en route with fellow gappers when finished. Either way, something location specific can enhance a trip and inspire you with ideas and enthusiasms for your own travels.
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts is a current chunky favourite and is a modern-day saga based on a specific period of the author’s life. Encompassing everything from philosophy and ethics to underworld crime and war, and set in India and Afghanistan, it is something to keep your mind engaged and give you ideas to grapple with.
Other titles that I would add to the list of books designed to last you a significant chunk (if not all) of the way round wherever you are would be Cervantes’s tale of the noble knight, the errant Don Quixote, Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy – an epic evocation of a marriage and a breaking 20th-century world, James Clavell’s Shogun, set in Samurai Japan, and The Count of Monte Cristo – a classic tale of a miscarriage of justice, providence, retribution and fate by the 19th-century French great, Alexandre Dumas.
Alex Garland’s The Beach (set in Thailand) and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code have been the choice of those wanting an easier, escapist read in recent years, with the more literary reading options often being something such as the Mann Booker winners Life of Pi and The White Tiger, Ian McEwan’s film-adapted Atonement or Rose Tremain’s Orange Prize-winner The Road Home which centres on Lev, a Polish migrant worker who journeys to London, both to seek and escape, on a path that leads him home to where his heart is.
A perennial favourite for the more surreal backpack is Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, a title harder than most to condense into a summary…suffice to say that the devil, in the guise of a magician, lands himself and his entourage (which includes a human-sized upright walking, talking, chess-playing cat) in 1930s Stalinist Moscow, with the general and targeted aim of prodding a few consciences and scoring a point or two for the artist’s right to self expression and freedom from state control.
Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky has accompanied people to Morocco. Haruki Murakami has been the choice of those heading to the Far East with titles such as Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. With Rohinton Mistry’s novels A Fine Balance and Tales from Firozsha Baag and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses likely to accompany a trip to India. There is even the wide-reaching Edward Rutherfurd, whose epic tomes encompass the entire histories of Russia (Russka), Ireland (Ireland Awakening), London, and New York.
The chances are that there is a novel set either where you will be going, where you have been or where you might want to go in the future…so save a little space in your back pack and see whether fiction really is stranger than the reality that’s out there!
See also: Gap year gear – Top 10 Author: Sam Golding