Travel book reviews: The world in your hands

FIRESIDE travel, throughout this coming Christmas season – given the quality of some of this year’s publications – has the potential to make you ignore, if not forget, any looming freeze.

Among the long-awaited highlights for those who savour their British Isles travelscapes, are a handsome new reissue of Wainwright’s guides to the Lakeland fells, plus a final instalment of Tim Robinson’s lyrical Connemara trilogy.

Robinson’s homage to a people and a landscape is one of the year’s most beguiling expressions of culture, politics and biography. Pervading Connemara: A Little Gaelic Landscape (Penguin, £20), is the haunting atmosphere of place with its rebel traditions meeting music and mystical folklore.

Wainwright’s landscape is equally loved. This second edition of Wainwright’s life’s work, The Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells (Frances Lincoln, £109.99), presents the original, whilst updating salient features. The collector’s box set is glossily seductive. Individual volumes cost £13.99. Each is written in a prose that bespeaks a love for the English language and devotion to place.

Best of the other classic reissues are Brazilian Adventure (Taurus Parke, £12.99) by Peter Fleming, presenting his quest along the Amazon, as Fleming attempts to unravel a modern mystery and finds his own adventure. Its equal is Richard Halliburton’s cavalier flying-circus, crossing Africa, Asia and Borneo, recalled in The Flying Carpet (Taurus Parke, £11.99).

The best destination travel books include Roger Crowley’s towering City of Fortune (Faber, £20), a work of history that scours medieval Venice, revealing its vast imperial power-base, and in the process transports the reader into a Mediterranean nexus which Peter Robb, in Street Fight Naples (Bloomsbury, £18.99), expands and deepens, painting himself into the 3000-year-old panorama in a coda to the story which ties up loose ends and sends you back hungry, to the beginning.

Patrick French and Colin Thubron fly farther afield, French ambitiously in India: A Portrait (Allen lane, £25), Thubron trekking To a Mountain in Tibet (Chatto & Windus, £16.99). Thubron, arguably our finest contemporary travel writer, enters not merely the glittery, holy mountainscape of the foothills, but also delves inwardly bringing his memories of bereavement to what is, perhaps, his most moving book.

French records each ripple of the modern economic and social revolution, turning his journey into a series of shrewd observations and pertinent stories, explaining the nature of the current rapacious change while tracing its roots. By contrast, comes a newer voice in travel writing, a stand-out, that of Australian Lucy Neville who, in Oh Mexico (Nicholas Brealey, £9.99), turns both herself and Mexico City inside out on a personal journey that renders the labyrinthine metropolis almost intelligible, grippingly so. It is funny in all the right places.

Among this year’s picture book gems are the stunning Great Gardens of Spain by Annieli Bojstad and Eduardo Mencos (Frances Lincoln, £30) and Lonely Planet’s book of Great Journeys (£29.99), both perfect diversions in which to browse, feeding one’s fantasies of travel with baubles of photographic colour. Lonely Planet’s Great Journeys include the trail to Machu Picchu, classic literary routes (Homer’s Odyssey, Mark Twain’s America), plus the exploits of explorers such as da Gama and Magellan, along with trips along the Spice Route and the Silk Road. The gardens of Spain are a revelation, including private and public spaces that veer from Galicia, through the main cities to the Canaries and Menorca.

Quick-fix pleasures beckon from the finest of this year’s anthologies: The New Granta Book of Travel, (Granta, £25), parading the talents of travel A-listers, (Jonathan Raban, Redmond O’Hanlon, Paul Theroux), leaving footprints in every corner of the globe, a collection matched for scope by Sunrise on the Southbound Sleeper (Aurum, £20), a compilation of “great railway journeys” from the pages of the Daily Telegraph. These sips of travel, soaking up the atmosphere of train rides, sometimes poignantly (Nicholas Sheakespeare’s journey to Paris), or wide-eyed and wondrous, (Gavin Bell on the Namibian Desert Express) take you at speed or at your leisure. Though less memorable than its predecessor, (Last Call for the Dining Car), this is again a serendipitous collection for rainy nights, fuelling sleep with dreams of escape.

Lights, Camera…Travel (Lonely Planet, £8.99) adds a dimension to escape by slotting together travel memoirs from globe-trotting movie makers, those nomads of the modern world whose business is furnishing our dreams. Travel literature purists may raise a querulous eyebrow, but here lie delights: follow Anthony Sattin footloose in Alexandria, or Bruce Beresford who blithely heads into coup-besieged Guatemala.

Other recommendations include Thin Paths, (Jonathan Cape, £17.99), Julia Blackburn’s moving, beautifully written account of times present and past in the folds of the northern Italian mountains, and of village life there. Yet another forgotten people feature in Jonathan Glancey’s Nagaland (Faber, £17.99) on the India/Burma border. Glancey shines a steady torch beam on “a rarely reported war” for independence fought by the Tibetan-Burmese tribes. A tragic history emerges along with a portrait of a people and a mountainscape.

Finally, don’t overlook Tim Watson’s There and Back Again to See How Far It Is (Haynes Publishing, £18.99), a scribble of a journey on an outsized Harley Davidson into the byways of small-town America. Nor should you bypass Urban Worrier by Nick Thorpe (Little Brown, £13.99): “This is the story of how I began to play a little more with my soul.” Do not be deterred. Starting in Edinburgh, Thorpe takes us on a foray that is as daft as it is profound. And as entertaining.

My book of the year is James Atlee’s Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99). If this were the sky you would describe it as being sprayed with constellations, shifting points of fascination. Here, through poetry, art and philosophy, unpretentiously, Atlee follows the moon across continents, tracking its moods, sprinkling his own dark, dry amusement, painting pictures, the stuff of travel.