Five Best: These novels about arduous journeys are transporting, says Rose Tremain

1. As I Lay Dying. William Faulkner. Jonathan Cape, 1930.

The Bundren family, poor white farmers in Mississippi, attempts to keep a pledge to its dead matriarch, Addie, to bury her with her kin a hundred miles away. The coffin is put aboard a mule-drawn wagon, and the Bundrens climb in and set off—just as a storm sweeps in, drenching the travelers and raising the river levels. Every jolt and tip of the cart is felt by the reader in this anguished under­taking, but William Faulkner is charting far more than a hazardous journey. At its core, “As I Lay Dying” is a powerful story of ­domestic entropy, a tale ­perfectly served by its elliptical, multi-voiced narration, in which nobody is ­listening to anybody else. As Addie’s body ­begins to putrefy and buzzards start to circle under the leaden sky, as the wagon is almost lost in the swollen Mississippi, so the secrets and lies of the Bundrens are washed up on some lonely and silent shore, where, still, no individual cry can be heard.

2. Voss. Patrick White. Viking, 1957.

In this novel set in Australia in the 1840s, Johann Voss, a German exile, sets off with a motley team of men to explore the unmapped outback. As he travels deeper into this hostile world, Voss struggles to understand the nature of the sudden and blinding love that overtook him just before his departure, when he fell for Laura Trevelyan, an orphaned young woman shunned in her uncle’s household for her obstinate cleverness. Voss has undertaken his arduous journey in the belief that suffering will make him a saint—a faith that both attracts and repels the men he leads, as it does his beloved. Persecuted by every tribulation the intemperate wilderness can inflict, oppressed by dreams of normality and sexual happiness, surrounded by dying animals and an ­increasingly mutinous crew, Voss stumbles on. Sensing her lover’s torments from afar, Laura—who has taken her dead maid’s child, Mercy, as her own—falls gravely ill with a brain fever. She ­recovers only when all hope for Voss’s return is abandoned. Patrick White, who died in 1990, won the 1973 ­Nobel literature prize and wrote a dozen novels, including “The Living and the Dead” and “The Vivisector,” but “Voss” is his greatest work.

3. Quarantine. Jim Crace. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957.

Judea. Two thousand years ago. A fat and lazy merchant, Musa, lies dying in a tent, abandoned to “the devil’s fever.” Miri, his ­pregnant wife, prays for her violent husband’s death. But while she’s away digging his grave, a young pilgrim from Galilee arrives at their tent and whispers a blessing to the dying Musa before beginning a 40-day fast in a remote cave. When Miri returns, Musa has recovered. For the Galilean is none other than Jesus of Nazareth. Jim Crace’s brilliant and audacious re-creation of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness succeeds primarily through incremental invention, lit by unexpected flares of anarchic humor. He gives ­Jesus four pilgrim ­companions, misfits all, rolling the dice at the possibility of rebirth through self-denial. Into Musa’s materialistic mind Crace puts the idea of claiming ownership of the land where the caves are found and ­charging rent for using them. And for Jesus’ suffering the ­author contrives a resolution that is shocking but also, for many readers, deeply satisfying.

4. Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living. Carrie Tiffany. Scribner, 2006.

In 1934, a “farming train” travels across the sparsely populated lands of northern Australia, distributing aid to poor settlers in the form of scientific data on animal feed, crop production and domestic skills. In the train’s ­“sewing car” is a young woman, Jean, whose romantic vision of the world makes her tragically susceptible to men’s desires. Dragged off the train by an impetuous suitor, Roger Pettergree, a soil expert, and married before she has time to imagine her own future, Jean embarks with Pettergree on a long, doomed journey to establish a scientifically managed model farm on land unfit to support it. In this debut novel, Carrie Tiffany shows perfect pitch, creating a world in which drought and vermin combine to snatch all rewards from human endeavour and yet where Jean’s generosity of spirit imbues the meanest artifact with ­transcendent beauty.

5. The Crossing. Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, 1994.

Cormac McCarthy is ­America’s greatest contemporary poet of the wild. His fictional journeys have strange beginnings and desolate endings, confirming man’s smallness in a world where “God sits and conspires in the destruction of what he has been at such pains to ­create,” as McCarthy writes in “The Crossing.” Here, 16-year-old Billy ­Parham, son of a rancher, rescues a she-wolf from a trap one winter’s morning and decides to light out from home, dragging the wolf behind his horse across the border into Mexico. Billy’s intention is to release the wolf into the inaccessible mountains from which she strayed, but by crossing a geographical and temporal border, he enters a world of anarchy and violence. Piece by inevitable piece, he is stripped of everything that gives his life ­sustenance and meaning. Billy’s ­courage in the face of pain, loss, ­hunger and bereavement, no less than his unsentimental understanding of the lives of animals, makes him a ­remarkable and timeless hero. This heroism is, in its turn, heroically served by McCarthy’s dark unraveling ­sentences that gather like storm clouds and break in freakish thunder.

—Ms. Tremain’s novels include ­“Music and Silence” and “The ­Colour.” Her most recent work, “The Road Home,” has just been released in paperback.