Books to Transport You: The Best Travelers' Tales for Hard Times.

In times like these, I'm drawn to short stories, novellas, and expressive memoirs with a powerful sense of faraway places: enigmatic flights of fantasy.

In the 1920s, pioneering French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry crossed the “desert as smooth as marble” to open new mail routes across the Sahara. His 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, weaves between past and present, real and imagined, from salt towns to antediluvian forests. He describes drinking dew to survive a plane crash and discovering a single orange in the wreckage. “I lie on my back and suck the fruit, counting the shooting stars. For a moment, my happiness is infinite.

It's not always clear what's real and what's a mirage, much like Japan's enigmatic dreamscape in Alessandro Baricco's love story Silk. The protagonist of the novel is a French merchant who in 1861 follows the silk route through Central Asia. There's something magnificently appealing about the way Baricco compresses time and space. He quickly passes through Siberia with just a few brief words – except, he suggests, a place called Lake Baikal.

Sylvain Tesson was in a lakeside cabin in 2010 when he wrote Consolations of the Forest. Tesson evokes walking on ice with the lucid economy of a poet, and constantly questions perspective: “When you consider the journey of a snowflake, from peaks to lake and from lake to sea across rivers, you feel like a poor excuse. for a traveller. ”

Another traveler whose pen seems to write even more fluently in low temperatures is Sara Wheeler. His biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard explorer, Cherry, keeps you enthralled in its icy grip. One of the youngest members of Scott's final expedition to Antarctica in 1910, Cherry-Garrard's many adventures included a winter foray to Cape Crozier to collect emperor penguin eggs - an expedition he described in his memoir The Worst World Journey. Wheeler's writing is deeply empathetic to the man and place, as she shows in her account of her own experiences there, Terra Incognita.

Daniel Mason evokes the equatorial heat of the jungle in 19th-century Malaya with his short story “The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace”, in his collection, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth. Mason takes you inside the head of a man whose “physical travels were but a faint trail through the vastness of his wonder”, through dense forests, “clots of insects” tumbling out of coconut blossoms.

For all the exotic allure of faraway places, the past can seem even more remote. As I Leave One Summer Morning Laurie Lee describes a long walk through Spain in the 1930s, when Europe was open, "a place of casual borders, few questions asked, and almost no travellers." There may have been a brutal war, but how I would have liked to have seen the Spain he saw – pre-Brexit, pre-cowardly, pre-mass tourism. On what we now call the Costa del Sol, he observes “a white-sailed fishing fleet, voiceless, timeless, still as air, floating on the shore like pieces of paper” – an image that transports me to a time and a place. forever beyond our reach.