Black Friday has been and gone; December is under way. I try to post about my favourite books before November ends, but this year other commitments have left me less time to do a round-up (and I haven’t been able to include travel photography). Still, the books below are all bargains even at full price, and it’s not too late to add one or two to a Christmas wish list…

The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape by Alexandra Harris (Faber, £25)
It was in Sussex that William Blake conceived his idea of “a World in a Grain of Sand”, and it’s there that the critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris conjures a world from a little patch of southern England. Returning one day to a bungalow outside the village of Storrington, she began wondering who else had lived in and around what had been her childhood home, and what they had done and what they had made of their surroundings. She started digging into local archives, and reading books on everything from sheep-breeding to warren management. 
She takes us into the lives of a 17th-century water bailiff and the poet and painter William Blake, of French secret agents and Polish refugees, of the exiled Jomo Kenyatta, who worked as a market gardener in Sussex before becoming president of Kenya, and of the novelist and poet Charlotte Smith, who made room in her crowded lodgings for desperate people arriving in small boats on the shingle in Brighton — in 1793, in the middle of the French Revolution. Harris shows us how, just as the Anglo-Argentine naturalist WH Hudson found reminders of Patagonia in Sussex, so emigrant farmers from West Tarring found a “High Down Hill” in Australia. Her aim, she says, was “to think my way into lives distant from my own yet so close that we have sat under the same trees”. She succeeds brilliantly. 

Airplane Mode: Travels in the Ruins of Tourism by Shahnaz Habib (September Publishing, £12.99)
“It is impossible,” Shahnaz Habib says, “to write a good story in which your primary antagonist is paperwork.” She doesn’t mean it. In this debut collection of essays, she tells a compelling story of the wall of paperwork put in her way when she, an Indian resident in New York, tried to arrange a trip to Paris with her American husband. She’s equally good at telescoping out from her own experiences when she does hit the road, whether she’s killing time on the buses of Brooklyn with her baby daughter or exploring the underground churches of Lalibela, in Ethiopia, with a friend. In Airplane Mode, she considers travel and tourism, their history, their guidebooks and their literature from the point of view of a woman of colour who grew up in the Third World. It’s fresh, thought-provoking and funny. I’ve read a lot about rail journeys, and even edited a couple of anthologies on them, but in her musing on her travels in India and Sri Lanka she made me think in a new way about trains.

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie (Sort Of Books, £9.99)
As she neared 60, beginning to see herself as “more hander-on of the world than its inheritor”, Kathleen Jamie started to write in a different way, distilling incidents, memories and moments into short notes and prose poems. Over a few years, she built her Cairn. It’s a waypoint from which she looks back at the natural world she knew and the one she’s leaving to her children, where “We are everywhere surrounded by those down-curves out of abundance into scarcity, even into extinction.” It’s a book you can read in a few hours, but that will stay with you for much longer.

A Sunny Place for Shady People by Ryan Murdock (Trinity University Press, $28.95)
Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence prompted thousands of readers to up sticks and start a new life in the south of France. Ryan Murdock’s account of his six years abroad is unlikely to do the same for Malta. Murdock, a Canadian, was based there when the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered with a car bomb in 2017. Her death shocked the European Union, but it didn’t surprise the locals. In his book, which is partly an account of island life as seen by an incomer, partly an inquiry into history, politics and crime, Murdock shows vividly how and why corruption spreads through every layer of society. Malta, he found, was a place where “Everyone had a price for not objecting and for looking the other way.”

All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworth’s Lake District by Esther Rutter (Granta, £16.99)
“Kith and kin” is a phrase my Oxford Reference Dictionary defines as “friends and relations”. But “kith” on its own used to mean a place where you could feel at home and most like yourself. While she was teaching English in her twenties in Japan, Esther Rutter had a mental breakdown, was sectioned and had to have an escort to fly back to Britain. It was only when she took up a job at Dove Cottage, former home of William and Dorothy Wordworth, that she began to recover. In All Before Me, she looks back on that time and how, while learning about the lives, writings and creative homecomings of the Wordsworths, she found kith and kin in the Lake District hamlet of Town End, and rediscovered “the joy of living”. It’s a moving account of the healing power of place.

Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness by Alastair Humphreys (Eye Books, £12.99)
Alastair Humphreys has cycled round the planet, rowed and sailed the Atlantic, and trekked over Arctic ice and Arabian sands, but family commitments and worries over his carbon footprint have prompted him to look for adventure closer to home. Really close. He decides to roam across the map his house is on — a 20-kilometre-wide area on the fringes of a city in a “bog-standard corner of England”. On weekly outings over a year he covers every square, on foot or on his bike, carrying a camera, a notebook and — because at the outset he can’t tell a dunnock from a denehole* — “a handful of apps”. Local is an inspiring account of the discoveries to be made on the turf we take for granted.

I’m currently exploring Myanmar’s present and past On The Shadow Tracks with Clare Hammond (Allen Lane, £25), and sharing in the Island Dreams of Gavin Francis (Canongate, £10.99 — not new, but out for the first time in paperback, though that edition, as I write, is not showing on the company’s site).

Finally, a plea to publishers: don’t send the work of young, inexperienced authors into the world without ensuring that it’s gone through what Anne Lamott calls “the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy”. A couple of books of which I had high hopes were ruined for me when I found I wasn’t just reading but mentally editing a bound manuscript of the first and a so-called “finished” copy of the second.

*An underground cave dug to gather chalk