Destination Reads: The Best Books to Transport You to Spain

Deliciously redolent of the backstreets and barrios of the hidden Spain, Nooteboom’s enticingly written and invitingly accessible history of this remarkable country is a true tour de force. Intimate in tone yet expansive in outlook, Roads to Santiago should be in every global traveller’s book collection.

The novel that made the literary icon’s name, Fiesta reeks of the macho, bohemian Spain of the interwar years and contains some of the best writing about bullfighting in twentieth century literature. Crisp, intense and unmistakably Hemingway, this is an enduringly great early work from a master craftsman.

Banville's recurring sleuth, pathologist Quirke, spots a worrying face in the crowd whilst on holiday in Spain in this characteristically elegant and deftly plotted new mystery from the author of Snow.

Immersive and beautifully atmospheric, this internationally bestselling literary thriller of intertwining stories from the late, great Carlos Ruiz Zafon centres on a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles.

A deeply fascinating and informative history of an ancient and enigmatic people, this bravura volume illuminates the advances and achievements of the Basques, native inhabitants of a remote area of Northern Spain. With the same eye for quirky detail that enlivened his accounts of cod, milk and Havana, Kurlansky weaves a masterly tale of a fiercely independent ethnic group.

The mother of the Western novel, Cervantes’s ever-green parody of knightly romance maps the colourful adventures of Don Quixote and his faithful servant Sancho Panza as they strive to perform acts of valour in sixteenth-century Spain.