In honor of Women’s History Month, I’ve pulled together seven works with a strong sense of place and even stronger women to inspire your travels. From an expat building a life in Paris to women hiking great distances to find themselves or a sense of peace in a violent world, brave women share their stories. You’ll also find fictional works by women featuring characters you want to befriend in Ireland, Paris, and Texas.
Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women by Annabel Abbs
When I started reading Windswept in Pismo Beach, I didn’t know I’d lean on its words in Whistler. It’s about extraordinary women who love to walk long distances. Abbs walks the actual trails trodden by Simone de Beauvoir, Georgia O’Keeffe, Nan Shepherd, Gwen John, and others in an attempt to better understand them. Yet, it’s also a book about overcoming and becoming.
“Remember this: a self is not a thing, but a becoming – on and on until we die,” are the words from Windswept that I returned to again and again in Whistler. When it came time to ride the world’s fastest bobsleigh track, I thought about how I would be someone different from the person I was before hopping in the bobsled. Ditto for ziplining through the Whistler and Blackcomb mountains. Thanks to Abbs, I wanted to keep becoming.
Places Explored: The mountains of Scotland, the rivers and forests of France, and the wide-open plains of New Mexico and Texas.
Read my full review of Windswept.
If this book appeals to you, you might also enjoy Skellig Michael: Hike Ireland’s Most Thrilling Island.
The French Ingredient by Jane Bertch
The French Ingredient is more than memoir. You can gain useful travel tips and cultural insights by reading it. Bertch explains the three ways to say oui, from a formal “yes” to the more casual “ouais” to what she calls the “inhaled oui.” Even more important, you’ll learn the unspoken rules of pouring wine at dinner, and why you should never expect your plate to be cleared before everyone at the table has finished.
As someone who has lived abroad, reading Bertch’s book felt immediately familiar, like reading a friend’s journal. I saw my own expat journey reflected in her story: the excitement, the frustrations, the longing for home, and the moments of joy. By the end of her book, I wanted to be in the classroom of her French cooking school, learning to bake croissants.
Place Explored: Paris
Read my full review of The French Ingredient.
If this book appeals to you, you might also enjoy We Moved to Portugal 17 Months Ago. We Leave in 9 Days.
There Will Come Soft Rains by Briana Gervat
Gervat dedicates her book, ”To everyone in the world who has ever longed for peace and still has yet to give up on that hope.” I opened her book and saw those words while at home in a St. Paul suburb in Minnesota on January 11th, 2026. I was days into a daily ritual of scanning headlines for signs of sanity and peace. On that day, her book was definitely for me.
In There Will Come Soft Rains, Gervat walks (and camps) along WWI’s Western Front through landscapes marked both by man-made devastation and hopeful signs of nature’s resilience. She is an art historian, poet, and photographer who makes the abstract tangible. Insights about World War I and its aftermath are contextualized throughout with references to literature and art from and inspired by the period.
Places Explored: France, Belgium, Switzerland
Read my full review of There Will Come Soft Rains.
If this book appeals to you, you might also enjoy Rome Itinerary: Spend 5 Perfect Days in the Eternal City.
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl
Every time I read a book set in Paris, I find reasons to return. Alas, the Paris of Reichl’s novel may not be reachable, though many of the places still exist. The Paris Novel is set in the 1980s. Some of its characters share memories that reach back as far as the ‘20s. In an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, Reichl shared that she wanted the American dream of Paris that existed in both the ‘80s, when the dollar was strong and the franc weak, and the ‘20s, the Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Back on this side of the pond, on the road, and finally free from luggage weight restrictions, I treated myself to the first hardcover of our return: Reichl’s The Paris Novel. I bought it from Mosaic Books in Kelowna, B.C., on Canadian Independent Bookstore Day. Even though I was happy to be back, her words made me wish I were dining with her in Paris.
Place Explored: Paris
Read my full review of The Paris Novel.
If this book appeals to you, you might also enjoy Christmas in Paris 2025.
Brave-ish: One Breakup, Six Continents, and Feeling Fearless After Fifty by Lisa Niver
Fair warning: if you read Brave-ish, your must-visit list will grow considerably. After all, she’s gone bobsledding, tried hurling (a fierce Irish sport), and shown Maasai warriors how to hula hoop. San Marino, the world’s oldest surviving state, is just one of the places I never knew I wanted to visit until I opened Niver’s book.
Her voice is that of a friend you haven’t spoken with for ages. Niver shares her journey from starting the We Said Go Travel blog with her ex-husband to becoming a co-host on a travel web series and a travel writer with more than 2,000 articles published in dozens of magazines. Despite her many accomplishments, her story is one of heartbreak, recovery, and finding herself through a list of 50 adventures she dared herself to try.
Places Explored: 6 Continents (so many countries!)
Read my full review of Brave-ish.
If this book appeals to you, you might also enjoy Melissa’s Travel Journal: Dining Solo in Porto, Portugal.
A Family of Good Women by Teddy Jones
I met Teddy Jones while on a pilgrimage to Larry McMurtry’s Temple of Books in Archer City, Texas. She counts McMurtry as an influence, especially his novels Horseman Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne. For me, it’s McMurtry’s Moving On. Jones and I shared a moment with the book that I’ll never forget. You can read about it in my post, Larry McMurtry Literary Center: A Booklover’s Pilgrimage.
On to the book…
A Family of Good Women is a historical novel set primarily in Borger, an oil boomtown in the Texas Panhandle. Borger and places like it, according to Jones, are utility-based, built for use rather than tourism. It’s an area of wheat, wind, and dust.
While the book’s landscape may not be particularly inspiring, the characters it produces certainly are. Six Victorian-era women want children but not husbands, so they all change their last name to Good and form a family free of men. The novel centers on one of their daughters, Imogene Good, a hardworking woman with an adventurous spirit.
Place Explored: The Texas Panhandle
Amarillo, Texas, in the Texas Panhandle, is an iconic Route 66 stop.
Read my full review of A Family of Good Women.
If this book appeals to you, you might also enjoy Welcome to Archer City: A Literary Texas Getaway.
A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy
If you’re looking for a character-driven novel that pairs well with days full of wind and rain, the ones best spent indoors with a warm cup of tea, A Week in Winter is a grand choice. Set in the fictional town of Stoneybridge in western Ireland, Binchy’s landscapes evoked those we explored on the Dingle Peninsula: rugged coastlines, rolling hills of gorgeous green pastures, dawdling sheep, and grazing cows.
The novel, told in a series of vignettes, centers on Chicky, who left Stoneybridge for New York City as a young woman. She returns to her hometown, renovates a long-neglected mansion into an inn, and becomes its innkeeper. It’s there, over the course of the novel, that the lives of its other characters intersect.
My favorite piece of advice in the book: “…read a poem every day and think about it, and whenever [in] a new place, to find out about its history and what had made it the place it had become.”
Places Explored: Ireland. Dublin and the western parts of the country.
Read my full review of A Week in Winter.
If this book appeals to you, you might also enjoy Why Ennis is the Perfect Base for Exploring County Clare.
Books and travel have always fed each other for me. A good book makes me want to go somewhere, and going somewhere always sends me back to books. Whether you’re planning your next trip or just dreaming of one, any of these seven books will take you somewhere worth going.
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