It’s always the way at this time of year: as soon as I post a roundup of forthcoming books, I hear of some more I should have included. Here they are…

The North Road by Rob Cowen (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22, April 17)
Cowen is a writer who, in his own words, spends “all the time I can in nature, exploring those intersections between people, place, time, memory and history”. His debut, Skimming Stones, won the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors and his second book, Common Ground, was chosen as one of Britain’s favourite nature books. In his latest, he turns his attention to the 400-mile-long backbone of Britain between London and Edinburgh, which was Roman road and pilgrim path before it was a motorway. “Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through,” the publisher says, “this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves.” Robert Macfarlane, one of 20-or-so writers who have already read and heaped praise on the book, says it is “Haunted and haunting… A dazzlingly inventive work of literature.”

Sh*tty Breaks: A Celebration of Unsung Cities by Ben Aitken (Icon, £16.99, May 8)
Aitken, best-selling author of A Chip Shop in Poznan and The Gran Tour, visited 12 of what national tourist boards had ranked as the least popular spots in Britain and Ireland for a city break. “The motivation wasn’t to take the biscuit or stick the boot in, but to… demonstrate that anywhere – like anyone – can be interesting and nourishing and enjoyable if approached in the right fashion…the book champions the unsung in an algorithmic, over-signposted world dominated by celebs and hotspots. Cheeky weekend in Milton Keynes, anyone?”

The Restless Coast: A Journey around the Edge of Britain by Roger Morgan-Grenville (Icon, £22.99, June 5)
In Across A Waking Land, Morgan-Grenville, a former soldier who helped to set up the charity Help for Heroes and was a founding member of Curlew Action, walked the length of Britain in pursuit of spring, and hope. Here, he makes a circuit of the coast in what is “at once travelogue and passionate defence”. Into his account he “threads the modern challenges that the shoreline faces, and the people who are trying to protect it. At once informative, angry and funny, The Restless Coast is a very personal love letter to our island edge.”

Land Beneath the Waves: On Nature, Place and Chronic Illness by Nic Wilson (Summersdale, June 12)
When Wilson, a regular contributor to “Country diary” in The Guardian and to BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, began researching the history of her local landscape and its wildlife in Hertfordshire, the last thing she wanted to do was consider her own past. But she realised her affinity for nature had begun as a way to handle growing up with a mother who lived with a debilitating chronic illness. Now in her forties, and struggling herself with health problems, she decided to revisit her childhood to trace the influence of the natural world on her life. Land Beneath the Waves “inspires us to develop a meaningful bond with our local natural spaces and landscapes, illuminating a hopeful path towards a better future for human and non-human life”.

Greyhound by Joanna Pocock (Fitzcarraldo, £14.99, August 14)
In 2006, after several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her fifties, she retraces the journey, revisiting cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers – Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz – who chronicled their own US road trips. She explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with the communal, and the privatisation of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes – an earlier, less atomised America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Greyhound “is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror and complexity”. (For a taster, see Pocock’s travel piece for The Guardian from 2023.)

Finally, a book that was published on January 2 — the day before my roundup appeared:

Return to Sri Lanka by Razeen Sally (Simon & Schuster, £12.99)
A new edition of a 2019 memoir by a native going back as a tourist. Sally, a global-trade academic who has recently turned to travel writing, was born to a Sri Lankan Muslim father and a Welsh mother. Just before his teens, a political conflict tore his family apart and he left Sri Lanka for Britain, barely going back for 30 years. In his book he tells of his childhood, the journeys he made in middle age, and what he learned about “a paradoxical island”.