Books like Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A nonfiction novel chronicling the adventures of a group of friends on their cross-country journey of discovery, featuring characters like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as real-life friends Neal Casady.

Bill Bryson humorously chronicles a two–person hike along the Appalachian Trail, mixing lively anecdotes with insightful looks at its history, ecology, and the people who live along the route.

Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, blends magical realism with contemporary events, exploring themes of identity, good and evil, and the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

A witty, nonfiction voyage that follows Eric Weiner from the U.S. to Iceland, India, Switzerland, Qatar, Bhutan, and Asheville as he seeks the source of happiness, blending travel, psychology, science and humor.

Paul Theroux’s 1973 four‑month train voyage across the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia becomes a vivid record of travel, railroads, and personal encounters.

An engaging travel memoir of Patrick Leigh Fermor's youthful solo trek from London to Budapest, showcasing his unrivaled passion for walking and European landscapes.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 19‑century expedition through the Cévennes mountains in France, undertaken with a donkey, provided the basis for his early travel writings and a means to distance himself from a controversial romance.

A revelatory collection of letters written by the author of The Broken Road. Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and one the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly gifted friend. The letters in this collection span almost seventy years, the first written ten days before Paddy's twenty-fifth birthday, the last when he was ninety-four. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper and his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner; he wrote his first letter to her in his cell at the monastery Saint Wandrille, the setting for his reflections on monastic life in A Time to Keep Silence. His letters exhibit many of his most engaging characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of language, his exuberance and his tendency to get into scrapes--particularly when drinking and, quite separately, driving. Here are plenty of extraordinary stories: the hunt for Byron's slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; an ignominious dismissal from Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque; hiding behind a bush to dub Dirk Bogarde into Greek during the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe's abduction; his extensive travels. Some letters contain glimpses of the great and the good, while others are included purely for the joy of the jokes.

The broken road recounts Patrick Leigh Fermor’s final hike across Europe, a journey begun in 1933 that shaped his life, assembled from manuscripts by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron.