David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”, as I’ve said elsewhere, takes me travelling in time rather than in outer space — back to the mid-1970s. James Briggs, a writer specialising in music and travel, first heard it a little later, in 1994, when he was 14, and was immediately smitten. Twenty-five years on, “with a career stealing his soul, a relationship in stasis and a hairline in furious retreat”, he was singing it in the shower when he got a mad idea: he should follow that line in the lyrics, “From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads”, to discover what life, love and “Life on Mars?” really meant. And he should do it on the bike propped in his cluttered hallway. From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads: A Bowie Odyssey (Icon, £20, October 9) is “a clarion call to embrace the strange, blaze your own path, and live as fearlessly as the Starman himself”. (For a taster, see Briggs’s piece for The Guardian in 2023 marking the 50th anniversary of the song’s release.)

In Lay Down Your Heart (Troubador Publishing, £13.99, October 20), George Tardios is also following footsteps: as the subtitle has it, Retracing Stanley’s Journey of 1871 in search of Dr Livingstone. Tardios, who was born in London of Greek Cypriot parents, worked as an FE lecturer in English. Fed up in the 1980s with city life, he got an urge to recreate an adventure he had enjoyed reading about as a boy: Stanley’s two-year, 1,200-mile expedition through Central Africa. Stanley had a team of nearly 200; Tardios walked with his wife and a young friend. His account of their journey is “not only a full-on survival story but also a rare time-capsule of life in Central Africa in the early era of independence”.

Tardios’s diary-based account had to await the author’s physical and mental recovery from the trek, further years earning a living in Tanzania, and “self-reinvention in a changed England”, where he helped to found the Arvon Foundation’s first writing centre, Totleigh Barton in Devon, and several poetry competitions, took up film acting, and published two collections of his own poems. He died last year having finished the book; his widow, Christine, will be representing him in public.