To mark 60 years since the release of On the Road, we've picked our favourite travel books of all time.

1. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Where else to start? This book should come with a health warning aimed particularly at those in their formative years: proceed with caution, you may never be able to settle in one place again. And you might take up hitch-hiking. On The Road features a series of trips made by Kerouac and his Beat Generation friends across America in the years after the Second World War.

Through the eyes of narrator Sal Paradise (Kerouac himself) the reader is transported from New York to Denver to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Along the way there's jazz, poetry and drugs. And there's Dean Moriarty, whose incredible thirst for life (and women) gives the book its extraordinary momentum.

"The only people in life for me are the mad ones... the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles," says Sal of his explosive travelling companion. And with those words, a thousand trips were launched.

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