We asked some of the world's most acclaimed fiction authors, including Isabel Allende, Peter Matthiessen, Alexander McCall Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, Tea Obreht and DBC Pierre, to describe their greatest non-fictional journeys. The 32 stories collected in Lonely Planet's Better than Fiction touch on everything from disorientation and revelation to disillusion and redemption.

However, these real-life tales all share one common characteristic: a passion for the precious gift that travel confers, from its unexpected but inevitably enriching lessons about other peoples and places, to the truths it reveals about ourselves. By turns funny, poignant and thought-provoking, you'll be transported from Azerbaijan to Vietnam, via Iceland, India, Samoa, Scotland, Antarctica, Alaska, Argentina, Nicaragua, Rome, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and beyond.