Travel novels are a great way to turn your trip into an adventure. Novels set in the city or country you plan to visit often describe cultural and historical details not offered in guidebooks, building a context-rich experience before you arrive. No longer will you simply carry the standard guidebook and wander aimlessly amongst the hoards of tourists. Instead, you’ll be dining with locals in the same restaurants frequented by characters in the novel. You will see the street corner where a famous bank robbery happened. Or, you might be sipping coffee in the cafe where a character pieces together a mysterious murder. Your trip will be full of experiences and sights that no other travelers can see because they’ve not had the same literary experience.

Read on the Plane & Take the Tour by Train

A recent twist to this travel staple is Chris Titus’ debut novel, The God Complex. The author created a free self-guided tour to go with his novel set in Prague. Readers can download a one-day tour from his book’s website.

According to Prague Self-Guided Tours, "The God Complex’s Self-Guided Tour of Prague is truly the most novel twist on taking a self-guided tour that we came across. This is because the tour is based upon a gripping thriller that is set in Prague. The author wove just enough historical and cultural details into the story to give travelers an exciting context through which to see the sites." The website goes on to say, "Compared to the other tours we reviewed that are densely packed with details, this option is more about creating ‘an experience’ and less about providing ‘a traditional tour’. We rated this as our first pick because it worked well as the glue that held together all of the other tours and resources listed below."

We agree. Your travel time will fly by as you get caught up in this page-turner. Once on the ground, the one-day tour will take you to all of the major tourist attractions, as well as locales frequented by characters in his book. You will appreciate the city map’s thumbnail images, chapter references, and transportation options. In addition, the guide provides some handy Czech vocabulary words, including greetings, dishes, and numbers.

Teaching Abroad

Planning on teaching abroad? With a population of only 1.3 million, Prague plays host to more than five million tourists each year. Thanks to its historic and cultural significance, the strength of the local economy, and the emphasis on education (both children and adults alike), a plethora of language schools have sprung up since the Velvet Revolution in 1989. As a result, the city has become a destination for foreign language teachers, with many thousands passing through every year.

As a former English teacher in Prague, Titus weaves many details from his experiences living abroad into his writing. While The God Complex is a fictional work, the settings and most of the experiences described are real. As the author described, "The book was inspired by actual events. I simply massaged and rearranged them to create a more compelling story. By solving a murder mystery, readers are engaged in an entertaining fashion that allows them to experience the same discovery process that the actual individuals underwent. As shocking as it reads, most of what you’ll uncover is in fact true."