Timing is everything when it comes to golf. And golf trips. Just ask Sean Zak.

His plan to spend the summer of 2022 in St Andrews writing about the town’s intimate relationship with golf was upended — on his flight to Scotland that June, no less — by LIV Golf’s controversial introduction to the world. His resulting tale is joined by the reissue of two classic books, each offering a distinct opportunity to soak in the charms, history and personalities of the game and of Scotland.

Zak’s modern tale, Searching in St. Andrews, features a cast of characters including his temporary landlord, a preferred taxi driver and a PGA Tour pro whose bag he carried around during a tournament. Plus plenty of golf with friends old and new. While he dutifully covers the LIV angle, Zak also writes deftly about far more important topics, like the value of making time for blethers (it’s a thing … Google it); why a slower pace of life speeds up the learning process in an unfamiliar country; and the rich rewards of eavesdropping in a town where golf is a common topic of conversation.

Searching in St. Andrews
Sean Zak
$28, Triumph Books

A Season in Dornoch
Lorne Rubenstein
$29.99, Back Nine Press

To the Linksland
Michael Bamberger
$30, Avid Reader Press

Lorne Rubenstein had no distractions such as LIV when he spent a summer in Dornoch back in 2000, an experience he eloquently detailed in A Season in Dornoch. The 25th anniversary edition includes a new introduction and afterword, plus Herbert Warren Wind’s New Yorker piece on the course from another, and where time was more than something you had lost, or didn’t have enough of,” he writes. We should all be so lucky.

In To the Linksland, Michael Bamberger’s stint caddying on the European Tour in 1991 serves as the book’s foundation, but its soul lies in the days he spent, the people he met and the golf he played in Scotland. The 30th anniversary edition contains a new afterword from the author, but in the opening chapter he sums up exactly what he (and his wife who joined him) were looking for: “We wanted adventure. We wanted to be overseas. The very word excited us. We wanted to open our lives to surprise.” Golf gave them all of that and more.

What Tom Coyne writes in a new afterword for A Season in Dornoch is applicable to each of these worthy reads: “Scotland is the protagonist of these pages — its people and culture and history seep into every word of this odyssey. A story that could easily have read as an indulgent boondoggle instead brims with a pedagogic generosity.

We might have come to learn about a golf course, but we leave educated about a people, a country and ourselves.” —Tom Mackin