MacLean's first book, ''Stalin's Nose
(1992), told the story of a journey from Berlin to Moscow in a Trabant and became a UK top-ten best-seller, winning the Yorkshire Post''s Best First Work prize.
William Dalrymple called it, "the most extraordinary debut in travel writing since
Bruce Chatwin's
In Patagonia".
Colin Thubron considered the book to be a "surreal masterpiece". His second book
The Oatmeal Ark (1997) followed, exploring immigrant dreams from
Scotland and across
Canada. It was nominated for the
International Dublin Literary Award. When the chance arose to meet the Nobel Prize laureate
Aung San Suu Kyi, MacLean travelled to
Burma.
Under the Dragon (1998) told the story of that country and won an
Arts Council of England Writers' Award in 1997. In
Falling for Icarus (2004), MacLean moved to
Crete to hand build—and fly once—a flying machine to come to terms with the death of his mother and to examine the relevance of
Greek mythology to modern lives. In his book
Magic Bus (2006), Maclean followed the many young Western people who in the 1960s and 1970s blazed the "
hippie trail" from Istanbul to India. His seventh book,
Missing Lives (2010, with photographer
Nick Danziger), told the stories of fifteen people who went missing during the
Yugoslav wars. His tenth book,
Berlin: Imagine a City (2014), is a non-fiction history of the German capital. When the 2018
Edinburgh International Book Festival commissioned
The Freedom Papers from 51 writers to explore ideas related to freedom, Maclean wrote a bleak essay about daily life in North Korea being a "scripted performance". He read this on
BBC Radio 4's
Book of the Week strand. ==Humanitarian work==