John Mullan's 10 of the best: long walks

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Basho From a journey that he undertook across Japan in the late 17th century, the poet Basho made a work that marries philosophical rumination to descriptive poetry. Most of the poems are haiku, set in a diary-like narrative. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding Cast out from his home, Tom starts walking to Bristol to join the navy. He takes some wrong turns, acquires the companionship of the dull-witted Partridge and wanders through Gloucestershire, to Coventry, and thence to London. Plenty of inns along the way, and a highwayman in Highgate. The Prelude by William Wordsworth The poet recalls his walking tour of France and Italy as a student during the summer hols. He walks some 2,000 miles with his friend Robert Jones, and turns it into blank verse: "And earth did change her images and forms / Before us, fast as clouds are changed in Heaven." The climax comes when they cross the Alps without realising it. The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens Nell Trent and her grandfather decide to flee London and head north to escape the malevolent Quilp. Nell, a devotee of Pilgrim's Progress , and her grandfather seem to journey through a symbolic landscape, in which redemption and damnation are both near at hand. Kim by Rudyard Kipling The orphan Kim, living on his wits on the streets in Lahore, takes up with a Tibetan lama and accompanies him on a long journey on foot to find the river that washes all sin. "'Now let us walk,' muttered the lama, and to the click of his rosary they walked in silence mile upon mile." On the way he gets recruited by British secret service to help them against the Russians. The Long Walk by Stephen King In some nightmarish alternative USA, 100 teenagers have to take part in a walk that is a national sport. Setting out from northern Maine, they walk down the east coast, having to keep up a speed of 4mph or be shot. There are no rests and there is no finishing line. The last walker left alive is the winner. The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald German academic Sebald turned a long, wandering walk through East Anglia into a sequence of visionary meditations. The odd things he sees inspire evocations of flooded towns, deserts and Chinese silk factories. The Suffolk coast becomes a landscape of existential emptiness. He communes with Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne and turns walking into a new kind of fiction. The Road by Cormac McCarthy In some post-apocalyptic future, a nameless man and his young son walk south across a devastated land, pushing what they have scavenged in a shopping trolley. They are fleeing the oncoming winter and dodging predatory cannibals, walking through a land of horrors towards the distant sea. The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris Successful New York lawyer Tim Farnsworth has a peculiar affliction: sometimes he cannot stop walking. When the fever comes upon him, he sets off to walk and walk until exhaustion brings him to a halt. Meanwhile his wife, having attached a tracking device to him, is out searching for him. He is "a frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter, peering out from the conductor's car in horror". In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut In the first part of a novel obsessed with journeys, the narrator, also called Damon, goes backpacking in Lesotho, trekking across mountains and desert with an uncommunicative and obsessive fellow walker called Reiner, whom he met while walking in Greece. Bound together by some unstated homoerotic fascination, the two men walk to mortify themselves.