The books featured below are the recommendations of several authors, including Rob Ryan, Victoria Hislop, Colin Thubron, Alexander McCall Smith and Douglas Kennedy. I also have recommendations from Angus Clarke, Ginny Light and Kate Quill, colleagues at The Times and timesonline.

The other choices are mine and purely subjective, aided by straw polls of other writers, perceived wisdom, Twitter and 40 years of reading travel literature. And the real pleasure in putting the list together has been in using the Times Archive to find original dispatches, reviews and features about the books.

It's a list and and I am very conscious of no room for Gavin Young, William Dalrymple or Kerouac. You may also think some to be simply historical novels: but then Orwell, Hemingway or Steinbeck would be in. To me, these are pure travel books: ones that have inspired later generations to follow, or to find their own way.

Please tell me your favourites - or indeed, your Top 10 - on the comment form below (or email us). The best will receive their favourite book to devour all over again.

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20. FULL TILT: IRELAND TO INDIA WITH A BICYCLE by Dervla Murphy (1965)

When aged 10, Murphy was given a bike and atlas and she planned her trip. And, having finally ridden to India in 1963 on her bike, she then decided to stay and work with Tibetan refugee children. She was, said The Times, an inveterate traveller "looking at everything and putting it down with naivety and charm." She had a daughter, Rachel, and stopped travelling for five years - but then set to again, with Rachel, covering India, South America and Madagascar (having previously covered Ethiopa by mule). She has written 24 travel books, the last - from Cuba was travelling with Rachel and her granddaughters in 2008. But it's her solo trip by bike, aged, 31, after the death of her mother, that enthralls. She fought off thieves and a would-be rapist in Iran, fell in love with Afghanistan and recovered from broken bones and heatstroke. Inspiring.
Times interview, November 1983: "I'm never frightened or lonely" - Dervla Murphy
Read a 2009 interview with Dervla Murphy on the Studies in Travel Writing site
More on Dervla on the Literature and Travel Exploration website

19. THE ART OF TRAVEL by Alain de Botton (2002)

For me this is the definitive travel book, as it addresses the fundamental question of why we travel at all. With his usual mixture of wit and amazing intellectual insight, de Botton examines why travel is sometimes disappointing and suggests how we can make our experiences happier ones, and also identifies what it is that makes some journeys so pleasurable. He calls on other artists to provide insight into the subject too – Flaubert, Wordsworth, Hopper, all have something to tell us. De Botton reminds us that our own impressions, rather than the things that guidebooks tell us to look out for, are what really matter. He made me understand why I sometimes find a renaissance church dull and why an airport cafe can seem the most exciting place in the world. It is a masterpiece of travel writing - Victoria Hislop

18. A DRAGON APPARENT - TRAVELS IN INDO-CHINA by Norman Lewis (1951)

Caroline Moorhead wrote in The Times in 1983 that Lewis was "as much at home in fiction as in travelling, with precise detail and a gentle, self-mocking humour." His trip to Indo-China was the book that was to kick-start his travel writing career - he went on to write another 10 travel books even after 1983. The Guardian obituary in 2002 recalls that he once stated that he preferred to produce 'revealing little descriptions; I think of myself as the semi-invisible man'. Graham Greene called him one of the best writers of the century. He was also a passionate campaigner. An article he wrote for The Sunday Times in 1968 about the massacre of Brazilian Indians is credited with creating Survival International.
Read the original 1952 Times review of Lewis's next book, Travel in Burma - "That Mr Lewis is a very good traveller was obvious to readers of his book about Indo-China. Its successor is even better" - V.S.Pritchett, The Bookman.
Read the Norman Lewis obituary in the New York Times in 2003

17. THE GRANITE ISLAND by Dorothy Carrington (1971)

She was so captivated by Corsica on her first visit to the island, in 1948, that she never left. She wrote the book in 1971 and died in 2002. There is a memorial in Ajaccio's Marin cemetery, with a quotation from the book on its base - "...that Corsica would be my lot." I don't think I have ever read a better book devoted to one destination over such a period of years. The traveller is a beneficiary of her accrued knowledge of the island, her immersion in a life of bandits and hunters. Unsurprisingly, her marriage didn't last but her love of Corsica did: two other books and several articles followed this, the definitive book on the island.
Read The 2002 Guardian obituary of Dorothy Carrington

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