10 great books any armchair adventurer can read from the comfort of their own home. Give your imagination a whole world to play with.

Before the busy summer vacation season starts, why not take an armchair excursion with 10 great books you can escape into? Maybe you’ll even discover your next destination between these pages.

Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan
Learning to Bow has been heralded as one of the funniest, liveliest and most insightful books ever written about the clash of cultures between America and Japan. With warmth and candour, Bruce Feiler recounts the year he spent as a teacher in a small rural town. Beginning with a ritual outdoor bath and culminating in an all-night trek to the top of Mt. Fuji, Feiler teaches his students about American culture, while they teach him everything from how to properly address an envelope to how to date a Japanese girl.

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society.

Oracle Bones: A Journey through Time in China
A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the human side of China's transformation, viewing modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

Extra Virgin: A Young Woman Discovers the Italian Riviera, Where Every Month Is Enchanted
In 1983, a pale Annie Hawes and her equally pale sister leave England for the sun-drenched olive groves of a small Italian town in Liguria. With fantasies of handsome tanned men and swimming in the sea urging them on, they are hired to work for 10 weeks to graft roses -- of which they have little knowledge -- along the Italian Riviera. But none of the men seem to be under 40, and Ligurians have particular ideas about swimming. Regardless, Annie and her sister are captivated by San Pietro's quirkiness and beauty, and suddenly their brief stay stretches into years, as they are bemused, charmed and ultimately accepted by the eccentric inhabitants of their adopted home.

From the Holy Mountain
In the spring of 587 AD, two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their world shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple set off to retrace their footsteps.

City of Djinns
A scintillating memoir of a year spent in Delhi by one of the best young writers at work today. Alive with the mayhem of the present and sparkling with William Dalrymple's irrepressible wit, City of Djinns is a fascinating portrait of a city. Watched over and protected by the mischievous, invisible djinns, Delhi has, through their good offices, been saved from destruction many times over the centuries. Over the course of a year Dalrymple comes to know the bewildering city intimately and brilliantly conveys its magical nature.

Outposts
Struck by a sudden need to discover exactly what was left of the British Empire, Simon Winchester sets out across the globe to visit the far-flung islands that are all that remain of what once made Britain great. He traveled 100,000 miles back and forth, from Antarctica to the Caribbean, from the Mediterranean to the Far East, to capture a last glint of imperial glory.

A Book of Lands and Peoples
Nearly 20 years later after publishing Travellers Tales author Eric Newby returns with a delightfully entertaining and far-ranging collection. An endless treasure-trove of the bizarre, the touching, the profound and the farcical, A Book of Lands and Peoples is a collection of staggering scope and range. From Herodotus to Wilfred Thesiger, from Christopher Columbus to Paul Theroux, from Nick Danziger to Marco Polo, Eric Newby has brought together the absolute cream of the travel-writing crop into one beautiful and fascinating volume.

Paradise with Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay
In 1537 a group of Europeans founded Asuncion on the banks of the Parana River in Old Paraguay. They were enthusiastically welcomed by the Gurani and an extraordinary fusion of New World and Old was created. Robert Carver's long-term fascination with this intoxicating world was fuelled by childhood stories of his great-uncle Charlie Carver, who vanished into the Amazonian jungle of old north Paraguay in search of Inca silver. He never returned, but his smashed gold pocket watch was traded down river and returned to the family in England. Now Carver himself travels into this forbidden lost world in search of his own golden city of outlandish experience.

Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love
What began as an assignment from her editor at the Wall Street Journal to investigate a hot new fad, the secrets of sexual ecstasy in Tantra, became a story that would lead reporter Asra Nomani halfway around the world and forever change her life, faith and identity. She travels the globe in search of this elusive "divine love," but ultimately hers is a journey of self-discovery in which the divine within herself and within all women -- all tantrikas -- is revealed.

10 tips for travelling to exotic locations
10 ways to survive in the Sub-Saharan African bush