Every 16 June, costumed crowds wander Dublin retracing the route of James Joyce's Ulysses — a whole novel set across a single day in the city. It's the oldest and most committed example of a 'book-cation': a trip planned around a story rather than a sightseeing checklist. The trend isn't new, but BookTok has supercharged it. One viral TikTok review can send a decades-old novel back up the bestseller charts — and put its setting straight onto travellers' wish lists. A recent Intrepid Travel round-up pulls together seven viral reads that map neatly onto real trips. Here's the shortlist.
Emily Henry's People We Meet On Vacation, a 2021 romance now adapted for Netflix, follows a travel writer and her best friend through Croatia and California. Readers can chase the same route, with Split and Dubrovnik ticking the Croatia boxes.
David Nicholls's One Day begins at an Edinburgh graduation, and the city — plus Arthur's Seat, the hill that frames the story — has become a pilgrimage site for fans. Pair it with Oxford, another literary heavyweight, on a Best of Britain style itinerary.
Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, which topped The New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, brings rough-edged Naples to life before heroines Elena and Lila escape to the island of Ischia. Ischia's beaches and natural hot springs are the payoff, easily combined with an Amalfi Coast sailing trip.
For something more current, Yang Shuang-zi's Taiwan Travelogue — winner of the International Booker Prize 2026 — is set in 1938 under Japanese rule and structured around Taiwanese dishes, one per chapter. Food-forward travellers can follow up with Taipei street food, tea-leaf rolling and spring-onion pancake making on an 11-day Taiwan trip.
William Finnegan's Pulitzer-winning surf memoir Barbarian Days spans California, Hawaii, Fiji and Madeira. Active readers can raft Fiji's highlands and swim at Nabalesere Waterfall, or hike Madeira instead.
Bram Stoker's Dracula proves classics can be page-turners — it's told through letters and diary entries, oddly suited to social-media-era attention spans. Stoker never visited Romania, but he based his count on Vlad the Impaler, and Bran Castle remains the draw on hiking trips along the Via Transilvanica trail, where village homestays come with homemade lunches and local wine.
Finally, Min Jin Lee's Pachinko tracks four generations of a Korean family across the 20th century, starting with Sunja's emigration to Japan. Its food-and-market themes translate into visits to Busan's fish market in Korea and Osaka's Kuromon Market in Japan — the modern counterpart to where Sunja sold her kimchi.
Why it matters: book-cations give your trip a narrative thread. Instead of a random list of landmarks, you arrive knowing the streets, the food and even the weather from the page — which makes destinations like Naples, Edinburgh or Taipei feel personal before you land. It works for any kind of traveller, too: romance readers get coastlines, thriller and horror fans get castles, and food-obsessed readers get entire itineraries built from chapter titles. Pick the book first, then book the plane ticket.
