Some books do more than describe a place. They make you feel the weather, the street noise and the way people greet one another. Here are five that turn a city, a region or a country into somewhere you can almost walk.
Moscow: A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles (2016)
A count is sentenced to live inside a grand Moscow hotel while a whole country changes outside. The hotel becomes a world of its own.
Tokyo: Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami (1987)
A quiet, melancholy story of student life in Tokyo in the late 1960s. Read it on a grey evening.
Kars, Turkey: Snow, Orhan Pamuk (2002)
A poet arrives in the snowbound border city of Kars. The silence, the cold and the politics all feel close enough to touch.
Korea and Japan: Pachinko, Min Jin Lee (2017)
A family moves across generations between Korea and Japan. Food, work and small kindnesses carry the story.
Anatolia: Memed, My Hawk, Yaşar Kemal (1955)
An epic of mountains and village life in Turkey's Taurus region, told with the force of an old tale.
How to travel with a book
Read the book before the trip, or a few pages each evening while you are there. Then look for the places it mentions. Your library may have a map of the city or region too.
