Novel Travels

Novel Travels My mission is to inspire people to explore the world through the literature they read.

I am dedicated to creating individualized itineraries to the destinations clients dream about when they read about them in novels.

There are books you enjoy, and then there are books you start handing to everyone you love. For me, that is The Unselect...
08/02/2026

There are books you enjoy, and then there are books you start handing to everyone you love. For me, that is The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion.
I found the series only a few months ago and fell completely. Beth Brower writes characters so witty and warm that you close each volume already missing them, and I finished one book and immediately reached for the next.
I loved them enough to send a set to my dear friend Lawrence so he could read them too. He met Beth in London and brought my copy to her to sign, which somehow makes it mean even more.
If you have not met Emma yet, begin with Volume One. Then clear your calendar.
emmamlion

Read at your own risk.Every book in here did the same thing to me. It picked a place and left it inside me, and I’ve bee...
07/31/2026

Read at your own risk.

Every book in here did the same thing to me. It picked a place and left it inside me, and I’ve been carrying the longing ever since.

The tea country of Sri Lanka. The chalk caves under Champagne. Charleston’s old houses and the ghosts that come with them. Barcelona, Oxford, Bali, Lisbon, a green Welsh estate, and a Victorian London I’ve walked so many times in my head I could draw you a map.

Some people travel and then read about where they’ve been. I read, and then I have to go.

If that’s you too, you’re in the right place.

Tell me the one that did it to you. The book that made you need to see a place you’d never thought about before. I’ll be in the comments traveling and then flying back here and April I was in UK Italy UK then then I went. I don’t know I was somewhere else in Europe then I was in Austin Texas then I was in New York that we were in Puerto Rico and then I got two months. I’m like I don’t wanna get on a plane I don’t wanna go easy. I guess we’ll be those kind of places for Beach the Caribbean, the British people especially the British a lot of the other you can drive on your side they drive on the wrong side of the road so a lot of of the islands are like that and you know so many of them were British colonies for so long so there’s so many Barbados is a huge British place to go and the only one that’s in Lucia because it has those mountains like a very narrow mountain so that’s really pretty tropical. I live 5 miles from officially the same Beach I’m getting I mean there are Turks and Caicos is really cold of water. Incredible but you’re on a beach you’re going to dinner. You’re hanging by the pool and it’s just a relaxing. I don’t understand why so many words come all that way that I actually.

07/30/2026

I found the coolest bookstore in Antwerp!

07/30/2026

Every book in this shop comes with a bottle.

His rule is simple. He reads the book first, then finds the bottle that fits. Sometimes it’s the plot. Sometimes it’s a character’s name. Sometimes it’s just the mood of the story.

He showed me one called Why Mommy Drinks matched to a holiday bottle, and I laughed out loud. Sherlock Holmes sits beside a smoky Islay Scotch. A Belgian novel meets a Belgian wine.

This is exactly what I look for when I travel. Not the biggest shop or the most famous one, but the one with a real point of view.

🍷📚

Found it on a table at Luddites Books & Wine, a bookshop and wine bar in Antwerp with no Wi-Fi and no interest in the mo...
07/29/2026

Found it on a table at Luddites Books & Wine, a bookshop and wine bar in Antwerp with no Wi-Fi and no interest in the modern world.

I already own every Emma M. Lion at home. Bought this one anyway, entirely for the map. St Crispian’s laid out street by street, Traitors Road and Whereabouts Lane and the church exactly where it should be.

There is no sensible reason to buy a book you already own, and a very good one to buy the edition with a whole world folded inside the cover.

Some journeys begin with a boarding pass.The best ones begin with a book.A story has a way of changing how we see a plac...
07/29/2026

Some journeys begin with a boarding pass.

The best ones begin with a book.

A story has a way of changing how we see a place. Streets become familiar before we arrive. Cafés feel like old friends. Historic buildings hold memories we borrowed from the page long before we experienced them ourselves.

That’s the magic of literary travel.

When you finally visit, you’re not just seeing a destination.

You’re stepping into a story.

✨ Where has a book inspired you to travel—or where has it made you dream of going?
Bookstagram

And there was light.That’s the line on the page Gutenberg is holding, cast in bronze in the middle of a square in Strasb...
07/28/2026

And there was light.

That’s the line on the page Gutenberg is holding, cast in bronze in the middle of a square in Strasbourg. He ran his first printing experiments here, then went back to Mainz and finished the job.

Here’s the part I love. Look at the base of the statue and there are four panels, one for each part of the world, and every single one has a printing press right in the center.

America, with Franklin and the Declaration. Europe, packed with faces like Cervantes, Milton, and Goethe. Asia. And one about the end of slavery.

The sculptor was making a point. A page can change what people know, and once they know it, you can’t take it back.

POV: you found the fountain from Beauty and the Beast.I was in my twenties when the movie came out. A grown adult. And I...
07/26/2026

POV: you found the fountain from Beauty and the Beast.

I was in my twenties when the movie came out. A grown adult. And I still wanted, more than anything, to be Belle in that opening number, drifting through town with her nose in a book while the whole village sings around her and nobody thinks it’s weird.

This is Colmar, the Alsatian town Disney’s animators basically photocopied to build Belle’s village. Crooked half-timbered houses, flower boxes, cobblestones, the works. Even the little iron shop signs swinging over the street look like they were drawn for the screen. I did not have a book on me. Did I perch on the edge of her fountain like the main character anyway? Obviously.

Here’s the thing. I was a whole adult, and I saw myself in her completely. The girl who’d rather read than do almost anything. The one who was a little too much in her own head, always convinced there was a bigger world tucked inside every book. Nobody had to tell me she was fictional. I knew exactly who she was, because she was me.
BeautyAndTheBeast

Some places you visit. Others you meet first on the page, then spend years wanting to stand inside.Italy is full of both...
07/25/2026

Some places you visit. Others you meet first on the page, then spend years wanting to stand inside.

Italy is full of both. These eight novels move from a Venetian sketchbook to a Sicilian family mystery, from Renaissance courts to a marble quarry in Carrara. Each one turns a setting into somewhere you can feel before you ever arrive.

Read your way there first. Then let us take you.

Save this for your next trip, and tell us which one you’re starting with.

The reading list

• The Venice Sketchbook — Rhys Bowen (Venice)
• The Glassmaker — Tracy Chevalier (Murano)
• A Room With a View — E. M. Forster (Florence)
• Eternal — Lisa Scottoline (Rome)
• The View from Lake Como — Adriana Trigiani (Lake Como & Carrara)
• Leonardo’s Swans — Karen Essex (Milan, Mantua, Ferrara)
• The Sicilian Inheritance — Jo Piazza (Sicily)
• The Half Life — Rachel Beanland (Sardinia).

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