Drive My Car: 20 Must-Read Road Trip Books

While road trips are one of my favorite settings for books, characters discovering they never really knew someone close to them is one of my favorite plots. So All My Mother’s Lovers is right in my wheelhouse. In it, Maggie hand delivers letters on behalf of her suddenly deceased mother. The recipients of these letters upturn everything Maggie thought she knew about her family. This story’s meditation on grief, identity, and family is powerful and bittersweet.

There is a simple way to describe the road trip in this novel. Two poets in Mexico City, ​​Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, travel to the desert to find another poet who has vanished. But that simple goal turns into a much more complex story that tracks Belano and Lima’s lives 20 years later. This novel, jam-packed with characters and ideas, is the ideal book for when you want a challenging book whose impact will travel with you through the decades.

Walter Dean Myers knew that kids deserve stories with real complexity, filled with believable characters and symbolism younger readers can grasp. Somewhere in the Darkness features the cross-country trip of 14-year-old Jimmy and his father Crab. Crab’s on the run from the law, but he’s seeking the man who can exonerate him. The road trip does not magically fix their troubled relationship, but it shows how understanding can blossom into forgiveness.

As the old saw says, wherever you go, there you are. This is true for Maria Griffiths, a trans woman living in Brooklyn. When she feels like her life is falling apart, she steals her ex’s car and heads west. When she meets someone at a pivotal moment in their life, she finally realizes what she’s avoiding. This is a book that resonates with many trans readers for its honest depiction of the experiences, emotions, and thought patterns of its trans main character. Likewise, cis people can benefit from reading such a nuanced character study. 

Among nonfiction road trip books, Love Is an Ex-Country is vital for showing how travel in the United States functions very differently depending on what you look like. Jarrar is a fat, queer, Muslim, Arab American who recounts her trip from California to Connecticut in 2016. She encounters hostility, but as a victim of abuse as well as online threats against her life, she knows well how survival mode functions. It’s a brazen book that doles out plentiful laughs along with copious tears.

One of the great things about Beverly Jenkins’s bibliography is that so many readers have different favorite books. Another of the great things about her work is that characters connect across series and time periods. So once you read Night Hawk, the historical romance in which bounty hunter Ian Vance is tasked with bringing sassy Maggie Freeman to justice, you’ll have to read everything else she’s ever written.

If it’s possible to underappreciate a classic, I dare say The Aeneid has met this fate. Retellings and adaptations of Homer’s epic poems abound. I say The Aeneid is due for such a treatment! The tale of Aeneas follows his journeys from the fall of Troy until he winds up in Italy, the ancestor of Romans. I love a good journey to the underworld, and The Aeneid has an especially heartbreaking one.

Books about books! I can never get enough. Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s entry in the road trip canon chronicles the journey of Osman. He becomes enchanted by a novel and sets out to create for himself the life it promises. Reading this, you’ll wonder whether Osman has lost his grip on reality while you vicariously experience his travel from Istanbul to the Anatolian steppes.

The stories of the assassinations of U.S. presidents are so much wilder than what I was ever taught in school. Sarah Vowell has an incredible knack for storytelling and inspiring her readers to take an interest in the rich details in history. She uncovers fascinating stories wherever she goes. Because of reading her books, I find myself pausing to read the signs whenever I come across a historic place in my travels, a habit I have found deeply enriching.

Jesmyn Ward’s novel, at its essence a road trip Leonie takes with her children to reunite with their father, just released from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, is a true southern gothic Odyssey. This is a road trip book that nods to hallowed literature while investigating the claustrophobia that can accompany being enclosed in a car. Cars can be haunted houses, too.

While many road trips are undertaken for fun, plenty come out of brutal necessity. Girls on the Verge follows Camille, who is pregnant in Texas and needs an abortion. When her best friend disagrees with her decision to end the pregnancy, she reaches out to a near-stranger for a ride. Then her friend has a change of heart, and the three end up in the car together on a journey demonstrating the lengths pregnant people have to go to to have control over their bodies.

Here’s an ambitious and multi-media road trip book. Following a family traveling to the Southwest to learn more about Apache history, their story becomes embroiled with those of refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border. If you’re looking for a novel that is both incredibly daring while remaining true to its road trip roots, this one is timely and thought-provoking.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who loves books about animal journeys, as I mentioned up top. The Incredible Journey hit me at a very formative time. The Travelling Cat Chronicles feature a man named Satoru and his adopted stray, Nana, traveling around Japan in a silver van to visit some friends. You will not be surprised to find that the journey ends up having deeper meaning, as journeys always do. Yes this book does feature the cat’s perspective and — spoiler alert — yes, the book does follow to the end of the cat’s long and happy life.