Writer's Journey is an excellent book that would make a perfect gift for readers and writers to treasure and motivate their own writing. An inspiring book with intriguing stories about the places that have inspired great writers. Well worth a read. Please to have and hold.

Such a lovely book for those that love travel and writing, was super interesting and insightful to read, loved that I could dip in and out of it, exploring writers I knew, and discovering new ones!

This book was a joy to read - I only wish I had the physical book in front of me to pour over and devour. The writer has put enormous love and attention to detail into crafting a fantastic journey through literary history.

This book will appeal to a niche audience who’s a little nosy about the life of others and enjoys history. I don’t think I’m one of them.

It felt like an autobiography but centered around a location. While I was interested in some, I felt like I was dragged along a package tour that went on for too long. It was very hard to get into.

Then I reached the chapter about Baldwin in Paris, and then it became easier to follow. There were certainly highs and lows when it came to the chapters, depending on the readers’ interest of course. But it didn’t quite pique my interest in the way I hope it did, though, I highly commend the clever wordplay in the chapter titles.

*A review copy was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I learned a lot while arm chair traveling with many famous authors. The author writes about a journey the author took and the impact that journey had on their writing and future books. A brief biography is also included but it does help to familiar with the authors included. The book is arranged alphabetically so you jump from different time periods and locations. The author does a great job of bringing you along on the travels. Period illustrations accompany the text. A selected bibliography is also included in the back for further reading. Enjoy the historical arm chair travels.

Travelling and authors – a great combination…

Writers and travelling go together like PB & J, at least in this informative read. The authors themselves spanned centuries and countries as this book’s author reflected on what did, or might have, influenced their writing.
Each chapter centered on one author and either an individual trip or a lifetime’s worth of wandering, providing maps and photos of each point in time. Of course I went right away to the chapters of authors that I really liked and quickly found myself intrigued by those who were lesser known (to me). There were facts and suppositions on what each excursion meant and how it influenced each author. The insight into the author’s lives, how inspiration struck them and found their way into their books was highly enjoyable. Not a primer, as it included details as well as general information, however it felt more like a springboard to learn more. It certainly added many more titles and authors to my TBR list…

The maps were a bit disappointing – very vague and almost child-like – however the words that accompanied them more than made up for it. Interesting from a travel perspective but, for me, much more engaging as literary biography.

A very fine browse for the smallest room, this flirts with multiple authors and their travels, and gives us the bare bones of what we need to know. It doesn't tell us too much about the places, it doesn't fully go into studying any literary output for firm evidence of the journey's influence, but it does show who was who and where they were going and probably why. So Jack London is seeking Yukon gold, Lorca is being told off in one respect courtesy a trip to New York, and Agatha Christie rides a certain train – as did Victoria Woolf and then Graham Greene, in fiction at least, but he ends up scouring round rural west Africa. The chapters come at you thick and fast, giving a one- or two-page map of the journey to fix it in your mind's eye (I don't think this has the power to inspire any copycat trips, whatever Calvino said and however much I'd love to return to the Crimea in peace and see it for more times than Pushkin did), and around the writing we get pictures of a general agelessness, and some verifiably vintage prints of the locales.

It is a wilfully broad church here, of both authors and trips – JK Rowling follows Pushkin, and, er, sits on a train for a bit due to a long-distance relationship, while Saint-Exupery follows her, trying to break the Paris-Vietnam flying record, and getting lost sans radio, only to crash into a random dune somewhere. Still, that wide-ranging scope allows for authors you'll never have heard of, and trips you'll never have been aware of, to places unsullied by your footsteps. The porcelain throne has had far worse examples of armchair travel.

I accessed a digital review copy of this book from the publisher.
This book covers different trips that notable authors took that ended up influencing their work. Each section covers a little bit about the author and their background, information about the trip, how the trip made one of their later works better, a map showing their trip, and a few photographs of where they were.
Unfortunately, the information about the trips ends up being like a list of facts, dates and stops, instead of something more engaging. Also, because the authors are arranged alphabetically, the time periods are intermixed. I think the book would be better served if the book were arranged by the dates that the trips were taken. Overall, the book ends up being dry and more like a textbook.
This is a good book for anyone who is interested in any of the authors or the writing process.

Common biography through a geographical lens.

For some reason I was expecting this book to have either more advice for budding writers, unique insight into the lives of authors, or colorful anecdotes. Unfortunately, none of those things are true. The Writer's Journey takes biographical accounts of famous authors and loosely summarizes trips that clearly influenced their works.

Each chapter, though thoroughly researched and supplemented with photos reads more like high school essays. I wanted to find grand takeaways from this read but sadly found little more than tedium.

While I am sure there is a reader for every book, this might be best for a budding reader who is eager to learn more about influential authors and their backgrounds.

[Thank you to NetGalley and White Lion Publishing for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.]

The Writer's Journey is a gorgeous book that would make a perfect gift for readers and writers to treasure and motivate their own creativity. Accompanied by stunning maps, notes, and colour photographs, it's a wonderfully inspiring book about the places that have inspired great writers. Thank you to the publisher for this ARC!

This book is interesting rather than genuinely fascinating. It covers a diverse range of writers but each section is frustratingly brief. I don't like the accompanying maps, they convey too little information and are visually unappealing. As a primer to lead to finding out more in depth information it is useful but isn't particularly enthralling in and of itself.

This didn’t interest me in the way I thought it would. It didn’t hold my attention most of the way through. However, I enjoyed some stories, especially the authors I’d heard of. They were all small and manageable chapters, so it’s easy to dip in and out of.

Thank you to Netgalley, the authors and publisher, for a chance to read and review this book.

This is a great glimpse into the lives of some of the most esteemed writers and their most cherished journeys. Transportive and fascinating. A great gift for any literature lover. The maps in particular are just lovely.

This is a fun little gift book for anyone in your life who loves little excerpts about writerly travels. I could imagine this book being a good waiting room book—there’s not enough here to read in one go (it would feel a little herky jerky) but little dips could be fun. I’m not the sort of audience for this kind of book—I like deep dives—but I do appreciate NetGalley for allowing me to explore this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Writer's Journey
In the Footsteps of the Literary Greats
by Travis Elborough
Pub Date 15 Nov 2022
Quarto Publishing Group – White Lion, White Lion Publishing
Biographies & Memoirs


I am reviewing a copy of The Writers Journey through Quarto Publishing Group-White Lion and Netgalley:


This book will help you to follow the footsteps of some of the world’s most famous authors on the journeys which inspired their greatest works in this beautiful illustrated atlas.


Some of the truly remarkable works of literature have been inspired by writers spending time away from their typical surroundings. This includes epic road trips as well as arduous treks into territories that are remote and not visited by many, this includes cultural tours and sojourns in the finest hotels. This books includes thirty five of these journeys from Authors ranging from Mary Shelley to Maya Wollstonecraft to Maya Angelou from James Baldwin to Jane Austen and many others.


I give The Writer's Journey five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

Thanks to NetGalley for this early read! It was a quick one and for any lover of classic books it was quite fun to read how authors may (or may not) have found inspiration on their travels through new countries.

Surprisingly, I’ve read very few of the books mentioned which means my reading list has also grown.

Lots of photos included and you can easily jump around to your favorite author or find someone new to enjoy along the way.

Generally, I do not consider the writer's life, travels, and experiences in writing their stories. That blithe perspective is forever transformed by Travis Elborough's excellent THE WRITER'S JOURNEY. Throughout this illustrated guide, Elborough discusses the impact that traveling had upon writers familiar to me and others I discovered through this useful guide. I particularly respected how the writers viewed their journeys and then transformed them to art. I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

A well researched beautifully illustrated book. The maps of the travel the author embarked on were fascinating.I was so interested in this book,will be buying copies as gifts.#netgalley #quarto

An interesting if brief account of how a variety of writers were influenced by travel to produce some of their most famous works.

Each writer is given three or four pages - a manageable amount for dipping in and out of, especially given that much of the space was filled by photographs and maps. Personally, I wasn't the biggest fan of the maps, but this is probably down to the quality of the digital proof copy that I received - I'm sure they will look much better in print.

Each 'journey' is given a bit of context so you are not only enlightened as to how the writer was influenced by travel, but also why they wanted to go on the journey in the first place. Even with the stories I had heard before (e.g. Bram Stoker's Whitby, JK Rowling's train journey) there were still bits and pieces that I hadn't came across, and the length of the short essays mean that this is a prefect book for dipping back into over time.

The only thing I would say is that those who are interested in only one or two of the writers in this book (and there are a lot to choose from!) might be better off looking for a more informative book about those writers in particular. That being said, there is also a fairly detailed bibliography at the back, so this is a perfect place to dive off into some deeper reading!

Thank you to NetGalley and White Lion Publishing for allowing me to review an early access digital copy of this book.

Well Documented…
Great writers, their works and more predominantly their journeys explored in this well documented tome. Photographs, maps and details are included to illustrate and provide insight on the journeys taken and the way in which they may have influenced works of literature. Well researched and often fascinating and illuminating.