Best Travel Books for Your Summer Reading List

If you’re looking for an absorbing book with a travel vibe, the following lists provide a whopping 49 selections for your summer reading list. Most of these travel books are recent releases, but we also included a handful of classics that are ideal for the armchair traveler.

Six of the Best New Travel Books for 2016: The Telegraph has published excerpts from six finalists for the Ondaatje Prize, which selects the top work of fiction, nonfiction or poetry that evokes “the spirit of a place.” Author Peter Pomerantsev won the prize for “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” a book about Russia that is excerpted in the article.

The Best New Books to Inspire Your Wanderlust: Travel + Leisure provides a list of 18 newly released books set in faraway places — India, the Galapagos Islands, Egypt and Haiti among them. The roundup includes fiction, nonfiction, memoirs and essays. All but one of the suggestions are currently available; the final one will be released June 28.

Summer 2016 Reads for Food and Wine Lovers: The five titles on Robin Shreeves’ list are all food- or wine-themed travel memoirs. They focus on the search for dining companions in Paris and London, the perfect pour in Napa and how food brings people together in Provence. This list will stir your wanderlust and your appetite.

The Books That Critics Say You Should Read This Summer: Quartz compared the recommended summer reading lists of six major publications and came up with a list of 15 titles that are recommended by multiple critics. They include Russell Banks’ newly released “Voyager: Travel Writings” — a collection of essays about travels to the Caribbean, Scotland, the Andes and the Himalayas — and Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing,” a novel that takes place in Ghana.

6 Books for Armchair Travelers: Though not comprising current releases, this list of classics from the blog Shelf Pleasure will transport you to Istanbul, Kenya, Paris, Russia and the Bronx.