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.

Books on the Brilliantly Disturbed

1. A Beautiful Mind

By Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster, 1998

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in the lives of schizophrenics. Once entrenched, paranoia rarely lifts. Thus the resurrection of mathematician and economist John Nash is a tale for the ages. While Nash's conversation as a young man had "always mixed mathematics and myth," by the late 1950s the MIT professor was going far beyond eccentricity. He talked of becoming the emperor of Antarctica; he also insisted that aliens were communicating to him through the New York Times. Nash spent the next three and a half decades as a revolving-door psychiatric in-patient and aimless wanderer. But after receiving the 1994 Nobel Prize for his long-ago dissertation on game theory, the former boy wonder miraculously regained his appetite for scientific study. Sylvia Nasar's "A Beautiful Mind" is less schmaltzy and tidy than the Oscar-winning movie based on it. The Hollywood version suggests that Nash benefited from new medications, but as Nasar reports, Nash actually stopped taking antipsychotics in 1970 and relied solely on his potent mind. "Gradually," Nash recalled, "I began to reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking."

2. The Man Who Loved China
By Simon Winchester
Harper, 2008

Best known for his gripping narrative about the odd couple behind the Oxford English Dictionary ("The Professor and the Madman"), Simon Winchester here portrays the hypomanic, chain-smoking Brit who produced an immense encyclopedic work all by his lonesome. In 1936, Joseph Needham, a noted biochemist and ladies man, fell in love with a young scholar from Nanjing who taught him classical Chinese. "Almost delirious with happiness" from creating his own personal English-Chinese dictionary, this "20th century Erasmus" then sought to rescue China from its lowly status as "the booby nation." Needham's magnum opus -- he produced 17 volumes before his death in 1994 -- was called "Science and Civilisation in China," and it argued that the Middle Kingdom was once way ahead of the West. Printing, for example, came six centuries before Gutenberg. Winchester spotlights Needham's perilous research trips, which brought him into contact with Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai, as well as his colorful non-academic obsessions, including gymnosophy (i.e., nudism), Morris dancing and burnt toast.

3. Empire
By Donald Bartlett and James Steele
Norton, 1979

Nearly a full generation before Leonardo DiCaprio did his star turn in "The Aviator," Donald Bartlett and James Steele punctured the myth that once was Howard Hughes. Today it's easy to forget that Hughes's name was, for a long time, synonymous solely with gargantuan achievement. "Nobody can outdo me," the 25-year-old movie producer proclaimed shortly after taking Hollywood by storm with "Hell's Angels" (1930), an early talkie, which he also directed. Eight years later, the dashing mogul became a national hero when he shattered the record for flying around the world by a full three days. Bartlett and Steele, having sifted through 250,000 pages of documents, detail every chilling twist and turn of Hughes's descent into emotional paralysis. By the late 1960s, just about all the lonely billionaire ("Don't dare call me millionaire!") looked forward to was sitting naked in the middle of hotel rooms -- "the germ-free zone."

4. The Difference Engine
By Doron Swade
Viking, 2001

In 1822, disgusted by human error, the 30-year-old Cambridge-educated mathematician Charles Babbage dreamed up a cure: a calculating machine. After his annus horribilis of 1827, in which he lost a son as well as his wife and father, Babbage was inconsolable. To avoid a complete breakdown, he threw himself into working on a mechanical computer that he called the "difference engine." A few years later, he completed a part of Difference Engine No. 1, a 15-ton contraption that he used as a demonstration piece. Unfortunately, Babbage's obsession produced mountains of elaborate drawings for uncompleted machines but little else except bitterness. According to one of his few friends, the aging loner "spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular and the English government most of all." Though as Doron Swade, a curator at the Science Museum in London, memorably shows in "The Difference Engine," this indefatigable misanthrope was the grandfather of the computer age.

5. Wizard
By Marc Seifer
Birch Lane, 1996

A century before cellphones and the Internet, another "wireless revolution" turned America upside-down. Its chief theoretician was Nikola Tesla, a Serb from Croatia, who secured the first patent for a means to produce high-frequency radio waves. Tesla was considered, along with Thomas Edison, one of the "twin wizards of electricity," Marc Seifer writes in this absorbing biography. Right after arriving in Manhattan in 1884, Tesla began working 20-hour days at Edison's lab; when his boss nixed his alternating-current induction motor, Tesla set out on his own. Seifer's meticulously researched account, some 20 years in the making, features riveting anecdotes of this man about town who hobnobbed with both Mark Twain and Stanford White. Like Howard Hughes, Tesla was a germo-phobe who called the hotel room home. But the room number had to be divisible by three, and he required assurances that no hotel employee would get within three feet of him. Sworn to celibacy, the anorexic Tesla saved up his passion for pigeons: "To care for those . . . birds . . . is the delight of my life. It is my only means of playing."

Mr. (Joshua) Kendall's biography of Peter Roget, "The Man Who Made Lists," has just been released in paperback.