Road Novels

Submitted by admin on Thu, 05/07/2009 - 4:14pm

Provided by the staff at the West University Branch Library.

 
Doris Betts. Heading West
A spinster librarian is kidnapped and taken across the country.   As time goes on, she stops trying to escape.

 
Sarah Bird. Virgin of the Rodeo
A young woman in search of her father hits the rodeo trail.

 
Charles Dickinson. The Widows' Adventures
Two widowed sisters take a car trip from Chicago to L.A. One of them is blind, and she does the driving.

Charles Frazier. Cold Mountain
A wounded Confederate soldier walks 300 miles home through the Blue Ridge Mountains, hoping the woman he loved four years ago still waits for him.
Janice Galloway. Foreign Parts
The adventures and misadventures of two middle-aged single Scotswomen traveling together through France.
Jaimy Gordon. She Drove Without Stopping
Jane Turner, age 22, spends a risky year on the road and turns her life around.
Jack Kerouac. On the Road
Narrator Sal Paradise and his bohemian friends hitchhike around America. A classic of the Beat generation.
Barbara Kingsolver. Bean Trees
Taylor Greer buys and old car and heads west. Along the way she becomes the guardian of an abandoned baby girl.
 
Jim Lehrer. Kick the Can
A state trooper’s son, One-Eyed-Mack, who wears a black patch over his eye, sets out on what becomes a picaresque journey.

Cormac McCarthy. The Crossing
A young cowboy rides south of the border to Mexico on horseback several times, meeting life-changing events at every turn.
Larry McMurtry. Cadillac Jack
A former rodeo cowboy roams the country in his Cadillac, scouting for antiques and falling in love.
Geoff Nicholson. Still Life with Volkswagens
Various British eccentrics search for the meaning of life, and are obsessed with Volkswagens.
John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath
The Pulitzer Prize winning novel about an Oklahoma farm family’s journey west to California in search of work as migrant fruit pickers.