10 Travel Audiobooks to Keep the Holiday Feeling Going

The suitcase is unpacked. The out-of-office is off. The tan is already fading. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop travelling.

One of the best things about audiobooks is that they take you somewhere. A good narrator, a vivid setting, and a pair of headphones can put you on the other side of the world while you’re sitting on the train to work. So if you’re not quite ready to let go of summer, here are ten audiobooks on xigxag that will keep you moving, from the Arctic to Japan, from the Scottish Highlands to a crumbling medieval souk.

We’ve picked five non-fiction titles that will feed your wanderlust and five novels set in places so vivid you’ll forget where you actually are.

Non-Fiction: For When You Need to Be Somewhere Else

The Wilder Way by Eva zu Beck, read by the author

Eva zu Beck had the career, the marriage, the life that looked right from the outside. Then she bought a one-way ticket to Nepal and left it all behind. What followed was years of solo travel to some of the most remote places on earth: a lone horse trek across Mongolia, a COVID lockdown on a desert island in Yemen, an overland crossing of the US in an 18-year-old truck with her dog.

Eva is a YouTube adventurer and National Geographic TV host with millions of followers, and she narrates the audiobook herself. It is honest about the tension between wanting to be free and wanting to belong somewhere, and it never falls into the trap of making solo travel sound like an Instagram filter. This is a proper travel memoir, and it came out in May 2026, so it is brand new.

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Wayfarer by Phoebe Smith, read by the author

Phoebe Smith was sent to walk the Camino de Santiago for a travel writing assignment. She somehow lost her way and ended up back in North Wales, walking Britain’s oldest pilgrim paths instead. What she found along the way was not religion but a reckoning with the things she had spent years avoiding: the loss of her mother, toxic relationships, an eating disorder, depression.

Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year and praised by Bill Bryson as the work of “a splendid writer and an inspiring traveller,” Wayfarer is a travel book that is really about what happens when you stop running and start walking. Phoebe narrates it herself, and her voice carries all the warmth and grit of the story.

Available as an x-book, so you can follow along with the text as you listen.

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Soundings by Doreen Cunningham, read by the author

From Mexico to the Arctic, grey whale mothers swim thousands of miles with their calves. Following them, by bus, train and ferry, are Doreen Cunningham and her toddler son Max. Doreen first visited Alaska as a young journalist covering climate change among indigenous whaling communities. Years later, now a single mother living in a hostel, she set off to follow the grey whale migration north, retracing the route that had once changed her life.

Soundings won the RSL Giles St Aubyn Award and was named one of Smithsonian Magazine’s ten best travel books of 2022. The New Statesman placed it alongside H is for Hawk. Doreen narrates the audiobook herself, and the combination of nature writing, climate reporting, and deeply personal memoir makes this unlike anything else on the list.

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A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages by Anthony Bale, read by Esh Alladi

This is not the kind of travel guide you take to the airport, but it might be the most entertaining one on this list. Anthony Bale reconstructs what it was actually like to travel in the medieval world, using previously untranslated contemporary accounts from Turkey, Iceland, Armenia, North Africa and Russia. You travel alongside scholars, spies and saints, encountering profane pilgrim badges, Venetian laxatives, bandits and mysterious witches along the way.

The Times called it “stunning, weird and wonderful and quietly hilarious.” The Observer said it was serious scholarship with a sightseer’s unbridled enthusiasm. Esh Alladi’s narration brings it to life. If you have ever wanted to know what it felt like to cross the medieval world on foot, this is the book.

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Kabloona by Gontran de Poncins, read by Grover Gardner

In 1938, a French nobleman travelled to the Canadian Arctic and spent fifteen months living among the Inuit. He was at first appalled by everything: the food, the cold, the customs, the smells. But as the months passed, he was transformed from Kabloona (the Inuit word for White Man) into someone who found himself living, briefly, as Inuk: a man, preeminently.

The New Yorker said no other book about the Far North was written with so much sympathy, vividness and dramatic imagination. Kabloona is a classic of travel writing, anthropology and spiritual awakening, and it has aged remarkably well. Grover Gardner’s narration was praised by AudioFile for matching the varied terrain of the book, sounding “worldly, disgusted, freezing and fascinated in smooth and easy succession.” If you want something genuinely different, start here.

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Fiction: Books That Take You There

The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary, read by Eleanor Tomlinson and Josh Dylan

Addie and her sister are driving to a friend’s wedding in rural Scotland when a car slams into theirs. The driver is Addie’s ex, who she hasn’t seen since their messy breakup two years earlier. He and his best mate are going to the same wedding. There is only one car that still works. There are four hundred miles to go.

Beth O’Leary writes romances that are funny and moving in equal measure, and The Road Trip is one of her best. Eleanor Tomlinson and Josh Dylan alternate narration, and the dual perspective gives the audiobook an energy that works perfectly for a story set almost entirely in a car. Emily Henry called O’Leary “that rare, one-in-a-million talent who can make you laugh, swoon, cry and ache all in the same book.” This is the one to put on when you’re driving home from the airport.

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The Island Escape by Jess Ryder, read by Erifyli Gigante

Juno arrives on the breathtaking Greek island of Inios with one purpose: to find the father she has never met. But he is not there, and nothing is as she expected. As whispers follow her every step, Juno becomes convinced that something terrible happened on this island decades ago, when her parents fell in love. She cannot leave until the family secret that has been buried for years is finally uncovered. Someone, however, will go to dangerous lengths to keep it hidden.

Jess Ryder writes atmospheric thrillers set in places you can almost feel, and The Island Escape delivers on the Greek island setting. Erifyli Gigante’s narration adds texture. If you want a page-turner that puts you on a sun-baked island with a dark history, this is it.

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The Convenience Store by the Sea by Sonoko Machida, read by Yuriri Naka

In the seaside town of Mojiko, in Kitakyushu, there is a 24-hour convenience store called Tenderness. The manager has his own fan club. The customers are eccentric. The shelves are full of strong coffee, sweet parfaits, egg sandwiches and crispy fried chicken. And whatever you need might just be waiting for you there.

This is the heartwarming international bestseller from award-winning Japanese author Sonoko Machida, translated by Bruno Navasky. It is a series of interconnected vignettes about the store’s customers and employees, and it reads like a warm, quiet holiday in a place you have never been. If you loved Before the Coffee Gets Cold, you will love this. It is the audiobook equivalent of a window seat in a Japanese cafe, watching the world go by.

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Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac, read by Andrew Eiden

After spending two months as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz comes down from the mountains and tears through San Francisco’s bars and jazz clubs before heading to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris and London. He is trying to step away from the world. He cannot do it, because “one must live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.”

Desolation Angels is peak Kerouac: restless, raw, generous and full of places you can smell and hear. It is not the tidiest novel ever written, but it is one of the most alive. Andrew Eiden’s narration captures the jazz-inflected rhythm of the prose, and the audiobook format suits Kerouac perfectly. If you want an audiobook that covers half the globe in a single listen, this is it.

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Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

There is a reason this is one of the most famous adventure stories ever written. Young Jim Hawkins finds a treasure map, boards the Hispaniola, and sails into a world of mutiny, buried gold and Long John Silver. Stevenson’s prose is tight, the plotting is relentless, and the whole thing is over in under seven hours.

Multiple narrated editions are available on xigxag, so you can pick the one that suits you. Treasure Island is the kind of audiobook that works on a plane, in the car, on a beach, or anywhere you want to be somewhere else entirely. It is also a brilliant one to share with older children, if you are looking for something the whole family can listen to on a long drive.

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Your Passport to More Listening

All ten of these audiobooks are available on xigxag, with no subscription required. Buy when you want to listen, pay from £8.99, and the more you listen, the cheaper it gets.

Two of the titles on this list, The Wilder Way and Wayfarer, are available as x-books: our listen-and-read format that synchronises the text with the narration so you can follow along, look up words, search within the book and share quotes. It is perfect for travel writing, where you might want to pause and look up a place name or re-read a particularly beautiful passage.

Browse these titles and more on xigxag.co.uk.