For his debut, Riding Out, Simon Parker made a 3,400-mile cycle journey around Britain in the middle of the Covid pandemic. In his next book, he is back in the saddle again. In A Ride Across America (September Publishing, £19.99, July 4) he cycles 4,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, “through the small towns and big issues of the USA”, in the run-up to what promises to be a deeply divisive presidential election.

The same publisher has two more travel-related titles coming shortly. In Children of the Volcano (£18.99, June 20), Ros Belford, author of numerous guidebooks to Italy and the Mediterranean, tells how, as a single mother with “not much money and a big dream”, she moved to a Sicilian island to give her daughters “a childhood to remember”. In Airplane Mode (£12.99 paperback, August 1) , Shahnaz Habib, a writer and translator based in Brooklyn, offers “an illuminating personal and cultural history of travel”. Her book was first published last year in the United States.