The Art of Travel

Why do we travel? What do we expect to find in other places that we cannot find at home? And why is the reality of travel — the airport, the hotel room, the tour group, the gap between expectation and experience — so often so different from the travel we imagined? Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel takes the question seriously, enlisting Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Van Gogh, Flaubert, and Ruskin as travelling companions who help illuminate not the destinations but the psychological states that travel both reveals and conceals.

Part philosophical essay, part travel memoir, part art history, it is de Botton’s most personal book — and the one in which his characteristic combination of erudition, accessibility, and genuine melancholy is most fully itself. The chapters on sinister travel, on the pleasures and pains of returning home, and on why we take photographs have never been surpassed as accounts of the inner life of the traveller.

Essential de Botton — and a book that will change how you travel, and how you think about why you do. Published by Penguin.