A good novel can do more than entertain — it can quietly book your next holiday. The Guardian Travel recently asked readers for the trips they'd taken because of a book, and the answers span ten destinations and a century of writing.

The winning entry took Dervla Murphy's A Place Apart to Northern Ireland, where a reader cycled and walked in the footsteps of a writer who toured the region during the Troubles. Alongside Derry's city walls and the Giant's Causeway, the lasting impression wasn't the scenery but the easy pub and café conversations Murphy promised.

Other readers chased famous fictional streets. One pair of lifelong friends followed Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend around Naples, finding the waterfront promenade at Chiaia and the edgy neighbourhoods of the novel far more welcoming than the city's reputation suggests. In San Francisco, a couple saved for two years to spend a fortnight living like the Barbary Lane crowd from Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City — a city they found weird, gorgeous and best explored on foot.

Sarajevo drew a reader via Priscilla Morris's Black Butterflies, set during the siege. The old town mixes east and west, with bullet-pocked buildings and mortar-scar 'roses' in the pavement left deliberately visible — a haunting but hopeful place, flanked by mountains.

Some journeys were decades in the making. After reading Georges Simenon's My Friend Maigret, a reader nearly 80 travelled entirely by rail — Eurostar to Paris, train to Toulon, slow train to Hyères, then bus and boat — to reach Porquerolles, the Mediterranean island where the novel is set. He got 'Porquerolled', and recommends the island wine. Another reader waited from 1980s A-level French until well into adulthood to see the Provence of Émile Zola's short stories, returning several times since.

Closer to home, RC Sherriff's The Fortnight in September sent a reader to Bognor Regis to retrace a fictional family's seaside holiday — bandstand, promenade and ice cream included. Amy Liptrot's The Outrun inspired a three-week solo trip to Orkney and Shetland, complete with a stay at the author's mother's B&B, birdwatching included, and a week walking the tiny island of Papa Westray. Eric Newby's Love and War in the Apennines led a couple on a month's hiking through central Italy, where mentioning Newby in towns like Fiumalbo — whose people once sheltered him as a fugitive POW — earned warm smiles. And a childhood devotion to Anne of Green Gables finally paid off at 44 with a visit to Prince Edward Island: after a washout first day, a coastal boardwalk, the Green Gables house and a lobster dinner.

The lesson for travellers? Any well-loved book can double as an itinerary. Pick a novel set somewhere new, and you arrive with context, characters and a reason to talk to locals — which, as several of these readers found, is the part you remember.