Just as I enjoy a good road movie, I love a well turned out road novel. Lots of time for reflection, meeting new characters and maybe a bit of vivid landscape description. Beginning with one that’s named after a road, 
and a very famous one too, below are five novels that take their readers along for the ride, all with links to reviews on this blog.
Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway is a 1950s American odyssey which takes three young men and an eight-year-old boy on a series of adventures beginning in Nebraska. Seventeen-year-old Emmett has been released from Salina youth detention centre keen to start a new life with his kid brother, but Billy has other ideas which involve driving the Lincoln Highway to San Francisco in the hope of finding their mother. When Duchess and Woolly turn up, newly escaped from Salina, Billy and Emmett find themselves travelling in the opposite direction towards New York City. Towles’s novel is a gripping, hugely entertaining take on Homer’s Odyssey, full of suspense, with a cast of engaging characters of which Billy is the undoubted star.
Considerably less cheerful, Ailsa McFarlane’s Highway Blue sees Cal turn up two years after walking out on Anne Marie with no warning. She’s wary and with reason. Soon, they’re on the run, one of them having shot dead the man pursuing Cal. As they head south, Anne Marie reflects on her short marriage to a man she loves dearly but who has hollowed out her already troubled life. An aching loneliness suffuses this bleakly beautiful novella, delivered in uncluttered, brief sentences from which the occasional gorgeous descriptive paragraph shines out.
Madeleine Watts’s Elegy, Southwest follows Eloise and Lewis over the two weeks they spend tracing the course of the 
Colorado River. The death of his mother has hit Lewis hard. Eloise is worried about his self-medicating, hoping that the trip might help. She’s in charge of their route which begins in Las Vegas, taking them through Nevada, into Arizona and Lewis’s hometown of Phoenix for Thanksgiving with his family, then on to Utah. As they travel through the dramatic landscape, Eloise contemplates the mighty Colorado reduced to a trickle by drought, its water used to power thirsty cities where sprinklers play on lawns, farmers grow water-hungry vegetables and anyone with money has a swimming pool. Watts’s evocative cinematic descriptions of the desert landscape offer a vivid backdrop threaded through a narrative in which climate change is a constant background hum.
Sarah Leipciger returned to her native Canada in Moon Road, the story of a missing girl and her parents, now divorced, who receive news decades after she disappeared. Yannick persuades Kathleen to travel to Vancouver, where Una had been living, to talk to the police. Although we discover what happened to Una, Leipciger’s novel is about her parents rather than her, portraying the upending of their lives by a loss that’s never been resolved with touching compassion and tenderness. Her writing is as striking as I remembered from her previous novels, glorious descriptions of the natural world shining out from elegantly pared back prose reminding me of her debut, The Mountain Can Wait.
Auđur Ava Ólafsdóttir’s quirky Butterflies in November opens with the killing of a goose. Our unnamed narrator tosses it in the boot of her car and begins to plan an impromptu early Christmas feast in October. Two lottery wins and quite a few setbacks later, she sets off on Iceland’s Ring Road with her best friend’s four-year-old in tow. What follows is a very funny road novel which includes a great deal of rain, ex-lovers popping up unexpectedly, a dead sheep wrestled into the passenger seat, a night in a cucumber farmer’s guest house, an Estonian male choir with exotic dancers, random shootings and an ill-fated bungee jump plus some distinctly off-putting recipes.
Any road novels you’d particularly recommend?
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