Why book club tours are one of the best ways to better understand a place

The first time I read a book set in the place I was traveling was entirely by accident.

My book club in Australia had announced their next choice—Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. I was traveling in Japan at the time, so I purchased a copy at a bookshop in Tokyo. Later, I opened the book as I slurped on some udon noodles. It was then that I realized that the main character had run away from his hometown to Takamatsu, a small port city near Naoshima Island—the very place where I sat.

When I returned home to Sydney, I found that the story had touched me in quite a profound way. In fact, it remains my favorite book I’ve read in the seven years the book club has been running. The sense of energy and place while I read the story sitting in those noodle joints captivated me, and has stayed with me to this day. I resolved that I’d make an effort to read books written by local authors in my future travels.

So, when I discovered that Bri Lee, a prominent young Australian author, was running a creative writing retreat in Sri Lanka featuring a curated set of readings and book clubs, I booked without hesitation. The tour was a full year away—but it sold out within just 24 hours.

Bri had selected two books for pre-reading, each offering different approaches and perspectives on the Sri Lankan civil war. The conflict took place relatively recently, between 1983 to 2009, primarily between the majority Sinhalese government and The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers), who were fighting for an independent state.

The first text was Brotherless Night by American writer V. V. Ganeshananthan, a novel which won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The story is told through the eyes of Sashi, a young aspiring doctor, and depicts her family’s experience of losing their men to the Tamil Tigers movement. Ganeshananthan’s writing vividly describes the landscapes and conflicts of Jaffna and Colombo as they were unfolding; the urgency to the storytelling made me reflect on the challenges that may remain after the war.

The second was This Divided Island, a non-fiction work by Indian author and journalist Samanth Subramanian, featuring detailed interviews, insights and human stories from the war. While the book deepened my understanding of the war, it was also a beautiful work of travel writing, thanks to Subramanian’s ability to create a vivid sense of place that allowed me to picture Sri Lanka’s tropical weather and scenery before I’d even arrived. I was particularly taken by his description of traveling along the southwestern coast by tuk-tuk with a local driver.

The book club component also gave us a space to discuss the ideas and themes from the set texts, as well as analyze the writing, and how it drew us in or pulled us away. The discussions ultimately made me reflect on the humanity of the stories.

These two perspectives were an excellent starting point to prepare for the trip. But nothing compared to the experience of setting foot in a new place for the first time.

When I arrived on that first day in Colombo, the thick heat took me by surprise. I marveled at the noise of tuk-tuks, busy streets, historic buildings reflecting Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial rule, and the extraordinary Red Mosque. On a food tour in the Pettah neighborhood, my knowledgeable guide Muditha Katuwawala introduced us to street food specialties, like juicy chilli pineapple and spicy kottu roti, a chopped roti curry dish best enjoyed, I found, with a ginger beer.

“Street food found in Colombo is a percussion of recipes introduced during the peak of the trade routes, and during the early colonial times,” Muditha explained, adding that the best way to cool down in the heat was with an iconic dessert drink, the rosewater falooda.

Later, at cocktail hour on our hotel’s rooftop, I met the rest of our group where Bri and our local guide for the trip, Suminda Dodangoda, known as Dodan, shared the diverse itinerary they’d prepared; hiking up Sigiriya Lion Rock, visiting the Sri Dalada Maligawa temple in Kandy, home to the sacred Buddha’s Tooth Relic, witnessing the elephant migration in Minneriya National Park (all in Central Province), and book shopping near Galle on Sri Lanka’s southwest coast.

It was clear from the start this was a supportive group of women, where everyone felt comfortable to express their unique interests and talents. As a result, we gained fascinating new perspectives throughout the trip. One woman’s eyes lit up when we looked out at the iconic cricket ground from Galle Fort—it turned out she’s a major cricket fan and I learned more about the ground’s significance.

Another shared her knowledge on the origins of Buddhism from her studies in religion, as we visited sites like the Buddha rock carvings of Gal Viharaya in the North Central Province. Meanwhile, I was drawn to Sri Lanka’s natural beauty; the deep green forests and warm orange sunrises at Sigiriya Rock and the misty, undulating hills of tea country.

It quickly emerged that our local guide, Dodan, was a birding expert. After dinner one night, he proposed an early morning session of birdwatching. Two of us were game. As the sun rose over the lake in Habarana, we experienced moments of awe in the quiet, before the heat had time to set in. We also spotted over 30 local bird species in just over an hour, including birds I’d only seen in picture books as a child, such as the majestic purple heron, and black-hooded orioles.

“Look, over there!” Dodan said suddenly, pointing at one of the trees. “Blue-tailed bee-eaters… they’ve migrated here, just for us to see.”

Each day of the tour, we sat down to write ‘morning pages’, an exercise which allowed us to write freely about our experiences. In Bri’s creative writing workshops, we learned to write in more powerful and emotive ways. In one session, we were encouraged to critique our writing through the frameworks of other art forms, such as music, dance, photography, applying principles like contrast and emphasis—these sessions helped me become more mindful and appreciative of what we saw every day.

The book club component also gave us a space to discuss the ideas and themes from the set texts, as well as analyze the writing, and how it drew us in or pulled us away. The discussions ultimately made me reflect on the humanity of the stories. Our group of women found many common points of connection from Sashi’s coming of age journey, and her moral conflicts amongst the events of the war in Brotherless Night. Our discussions of the powerful interviews and historical research in This Divided Island reminded me that when you visit a new country, there’s always more than meets the eye. I was inspired to read even more widely, picking up local titles from book shops along the way.

“I think post-COVID, we’ve been so disconnected from each other in so many different ways,” she tells me. “People are desperate for human connection, and books bring people together. Having a chance to learn about somebody else’s story, then discuss that story with somebody else is just a further extension of that.”

- Megan Christopher, founder, Ladies Who Lit

After returning home, I was buoyed by how enriching and thought-provoking the experience of literary travel could be. It felt like a privilege to travel with such kind, open, and intelligent women—and it seemed there was a clear demand for it, given how quickly this tour sold out.

Shortly after the trip, Bri Lee launched her own travel company, Bibliocarta. Bibliocarta aims to create impactful small-group travel experiences with curated reading guides tailored to each destination. Bibliocarta also runs local author nights across Australia, to help bring the enriching experience of travel back home.

“What I wanted to create with Bibliocarta was that magical feeling of being in the best-ever book club—full of funny, curious, kind people—but on the road together, learning about a place the way you learn about literature,” Bri told me.

Many people are drawn to the experience of literary travel for the opportunity to engage with a community of like-minded women. This has certainly been the case for Megan Christopher, founder of Ladies Who Lit, a tour company based in the UK. Her speciality is ‘Reading Retreats’ getaways where women can chat about books in stunning destinations as varied as The Cotswolds in the UK and the islands of the Caribbean, all the while hanging by the pool with a glass of wine.

“I want to create a safe space for women to be women,” Megan said. “The tours give them a chance to do a bit of solo travel, but there’s a community of women waiting at the end.”

Megan’s business took off after she posted about her first Reading Retreat on TikTok and it went viral. Now, she can barely keep up with the extraordinary demand.

“I think post-COVID, we’ve been so disconnected from each other in so many different ways,” she tells me. “People are desperate for human connection, and books bring people together. Having a chance to learn about somebody else’s story, then discuss that story with somebody else is just a further extension of that.”

Literary tours are also an opportunity for bookshops to nurture their literary community in new ways. One of Sydney’s most iconic independent bookstores, Better Read Than Dead, launched Better Read Tours in 2017, and has been running literary tours and writing retreats ever since. The tours curate a reading list of books for each destination, and participants are encouraged to discuss key themes and gain insights from a literary expert.

“Better Read Than Dead has always been more than a bookstore—it has been at the heart of a thriving literary community since its inception,” says Dr Danica Jenkins, program director of Better Read Tours. “We work with many talented authors who travel a lot for research and inspiration—it made sense to use their expertise to help us design unique and memorable travel experiences for like-minded bibliophiles and writers.”

Before I embarked on a book club tour, I thought that reading alone was the key to deepening my experience of a place through literature. But I’ve now learned that it’s just the beginning. Connecting with a community of like-minded women in Sri Lanka and reflecting on the power of the stories we read together was in itself extraordinarily meaningful—and it’s this that has broadened my horizons for future travels.

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