Let’s start with the obvious, the granddaddy of all road trip novels: On the Road. If you’re reading this, you’ve no doubt already devoured Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, which describes various trips undertaken by Sal Paradise and his best friend/sidekick Dean Moriarty. The Beat classic more or less charted the entire genre of road trip novels for generations to come. So which ones are worth your time?
The books that follow describe various road trips—and, to be honest, one wagon trip. In many cases, the road trip becomes a literary vehicle for an interior journey, through which characters discover facets of themselves. But other road trip novels concentrate on the land or society where people travel, showcasing new worlds or portraying familiar worlds in new ways. For a super-meta experience, download these as audiobooks and listen while you drive.
Loosely based on the relationship between photographer Berenice Abbott and critic Elizabeth McCausland, Housemates uses the road trip to celebrate both Queer life and the creative life. Housemates Bernie and Leah set off through rural Pennsylvania after Bernie’s former photography professor leaves behind a complicated inheritance. As the miles tick by, they document the people they meet and the sights they see and open themselves up to imaginative as well as romantic opportunities. Few metaphors for the freedom and possibilities of youth are as apt as that of the open road.
The Hunger adds a supernatural element to the true story of the Donner Party, the most famous wagon trip in American history. In the hands of Alma Katsu, misfortune after misfortune befalls the 19th-century pioneers as they journey west from Illinois. Wolves and bears track them; whispers of demonic creatures begin to amplify. Eventually, the group becomes snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Seemingly everyone has a secret, and unexplained horrors, such as a child’s mutilated corpse, only add to the deeply unsettling atmosphere. We all know what happened, or do we?
It’s 1954, and four young men are riding along the Lincoln Highway, from Nebraska to New York. This celebrated eponymous novel takes place over ten days but nevertheless evidences a broad scope that portrays people, and a country, on the cusp of significant change. The first highway to cross America, the Lincoln Highway fundamentally changed travel. Though each of us has the same ultimate destination, rarely does anyone live a life in a straight line. Instead, our lives wander, intersect, overlap and zigzag until we arrive at our very own exit.
Like so many parents, the unnamed, unhappily married mother and father in Lost Children Archive must find a way to entertain their young kids on a long car trip. On the radio, they hear about children disappearing in the desert or being detained at the U.S.-Mexico border. They talk about the Apache, including Geronimo. They pass abandoned hotels and gas stations and see environmental degradation firsthand. This prize-winning, genre-bending work builds to an epic climax and offers a penetrating indictment of immigration policy, especially with regard to unaccompanied minors.
Lulu Zavala is doing her darndest to get into Stanford’s summer internship program. She also wants to mend the relationship between her overbearing Peruvian mom and older sister, Clara. Meanwhile, her other sister, Milagro, wants to win back her ex and lose her virginity, not necessarily in that order. Can the siblings set aside their differences—and possibly start to bond—on a bus trip from Baltimore to San Francisco? This sweet YA novel just might remind readers of happy-ish memories of going places with their own siblings.
True Grit gets most of the love, but Charles Portis’s first novel, published in 1966, is worth a second look. As the comic novel opens, Norwood Pratt has recently been discharged from the Marines when he gets robbed by a family. He crisscrosses the country from Texas to New York and back. Ensuing adventures range from rescuing a fortune-telling chicken to falling in love on a lengthy bus ride. Road trips are about the people we meet, implies Portis, as well as the (mis)adventures we accumulate along the way.
Given the choice, there’s absolutely zero chance that Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee—two ex-cons with racist, homophobic and otherwise severely misanthropic tendencies—would drive around with one another in a beat-up truck. Yet, after their married sons are murdered, Ike, a Black man trying to stay straight, teams up with Buddy Lee, a poor white alcoholic, to avenge the deaths. Raw and violent, Razorblade Tears upends the trope of the freewheeling buddy adventure. Fingers crossed Denzel Washington plays Ike and John Hawkes plays Buddy Lee in the forthcoming movie.
In She’s Up to No Good, Grandma Evelyn hits the road with her granddaughter Jenna. On the way to her Massachusetts hometown, Evelyn shares the story of her first, forbidden love while Jenna struggles to understand why her husband wants a divorce. Dual timelines propel the story forward, as Evelyn reconnects with her former flame seventy-odd years later, and Jenna starts spending time with his great-nephew. “You can’t go home again” goes the cliché, but you can always develop a more nuanced understanding of your family and your past.
Sometimes We Tell the Truth retells The Canterbury Tales, replacing pilgrims going to visit a religious shrine with contemporary teens on a school civics trip to DC. The teacher chaperone guarantees an automatic A to the person who offers up the best narrative. Some tales are real, some are fake and some are shocking and about to change everything. With a PhD and specialty in medieval literature, Kim Zarins closely affiliates her characters with Chaucer’s. Both works underscore a key fact about road trips: there’s nothing like a story to pass the time.
Jade Chang uses the road trip to probe the immigrant experience, to explore Asian-American identity, and most hilariously, to undercut Asian stereotypes. As the novel opens, self-made millionaire Charles Wang is packing up his ancient station wagon and preparing to leave his Bel Air mansion ahead of its foreclosure. He’s lost his fortune in a financial crisis, so he intends to collect his kids from schools he can’t afford anymore, get them settled with his eldest daughter and move to China to start again. But, like a driver who’s misplaced the map, nothing goes according to plan.
