Kia ora and welcome to the Reading Doctor! Each week, literary critic and devoted reader Dr Louise recommends books to us on a particular theme, or responds to reader questions. Send us your questions for her by emailing: communications@read-nz.org

On the road

Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck wrote the archetypal road trip books: observing and recording the world while always passing through it, on what is also an internal journey of self-discovery, a privileged journey which represents freedom and escape from the everyday, and fairly masculine in tone. These books offer variants on a well-loved theme.

- America’s first transcontinental highway was The Lincoln Highway, beginning in New York and ending in San Francisco, where 18-year-old Emmett Watson and his younger brother intend to make a new start, in Amos Towles’ novel of 1950s America.

- Following the last wishes of their comrade, a group of war veterans travel from London to Margate to scatter his ashes in Graham Swift’s Last Orders.

- Two estranged friends reunite for a long-planned road trip through Brazil, in this queer coming-of-age novel by young Brazilian writer, Carol Bensimon, titled We All Loved Cowboys.

- A father and his young son travel through a perilous post-apocalyptic America some years after a devastating extinction event in Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novel The Road.

- A young man who yearns to travel the world makes his way from New Zealand to Victorian England, working by day as a living exhibit in a London show, walking the streets by night and observing its inhabitants through a distinctively Māori lens in The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke by Tina Makereti.

- Bea is on the run through Texas when she runs into Lou, in the magical-realist graphic novel Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden; they must trust each other to stay safe in a story about friendship and human connection.

- Driving from New York to Arizona with her husband and two children, a documentarian tells stories about the children separated from their parents after seeking asylum at the Mexican-American border, in The Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli.

- When his Māori father forcibly seizes the body of Box’s stepson in order to bury him on ancestral land, Box finds himself in his old truck driving north, desperate and grieving, in Carl Nixon’s Settlers’ Creek.

- Facing financial ruin in the wake of the GFC, Charles and Barbra Wang – Chinese/Taiwanese immigrants to America – drive cross-country from their Bel-Air mansion to their eldest daughter’s house in upstate New York, picking up their children from a Santa Barbara boarding school and Arizona State University on the way, in the comic novel The Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang.

- Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain, seeking work, leaving loved ones behind, heading towards the deep strangeness of the British in both hope and trepidation, in Rose Tremain’s very moving novel, The Road Home.